Infusion Monitoring for Lightweight Prolonged Field Care

IV drugs are essential to prolonged field care, and they require a delivery mechanism – usually an infusion pump. But pumps are expensive and ill-suited for austere environments. Gravity infusions are a low-cost and versatile alternative delivery mechanism, but they require drop-counting which is inaccurate and time-consuming. How to solve for effective IV drug delivery in austere and surge settings is an unknown-unknown that this proposal addresses by introducing the DripAssist, an FDA-cleared device that has been used in challenging military and civilian settings to administer dose-sensitive medications. The DripAssist packs real-time signal smoothing algorithms, clinically-relevant alert thresholds, and low-power high-sampling rate sensor methods into a deck-of-cards-sized device that clips easily onto any standard gravity infusion set to provide continuous infusion monitoring. This effort is to conduct customer discovery to assess how the new fixed-wing ready DripAssist Plus and/or its core technology can serve US Air Force flight nurses and technicians as they monitor multiple, simultaneous infusions during aerovac flights or in aeromedical staging facilities. The Shift Labs team has reached out to numerous Air Force stakeholders and is equipped with both positive preliminary feedback and the operational capacity to find a rapid product-market fit.