Inspiren, a technology company founded and led by nurses, has developed a truly innovative device to help fight COVID-19 and ensure that staff are adequately protected at all times. Since the inception of the pandemic, Inspiren’s founding nurses have been on the front lines at hospitals in New York City and Central New Jersey, identifying the needs of staff. The company’s flagship product? The iN.
iN, an easy to install, wall mounted device, is at the bedside, essentially performing contact tracing. Inspiren provides feedback as to who entered the room, how long they were there, how close they were to the patient, and if PPE (personal protective equipment) was properly secured throughout the visit.
“Our mission has always been to protect patients and safeguard staff,” says Michael Wang, RN, CEO of Inspiren. “The collective efforts of clinicians and technologists working side by side over the last few years have manifested this mission. It is an honor to be able to provide peace of mind to those who are selflessly putting themselves on the front lines to care for patients.”
Commenting on the “backstory” was Paul Coyne, president and co-founder of Inspiren, who told OTW, “Inspiren CEO, Mike Wang, and I were great friends and study partners in nursing school. We stayed in touch after he became a cardiothoracic nurse and I moved into the field of informatics. During his time at the bedside, Mike recognized an opportunity to significantly improve patient care through remote ambient monitoring as clinicians cannot have eyes on patients at all times.”
“We met and brainstormed to envision a world where smart sensors analyzed, not the EHR [electronic heath records], but the actual digital and physical environment of the patient room, to automatically detect patient behavior, intelligently notify caregivers of risk, and provide clinical management insight into behavioral trends. From this idea, Inspiren was born. We developed a team of nurses, healthcare executives, technology delivery experts, and computer vision engineers to create the product and bring it to life.”
Coyne explained to OTW how he and his team developed this innovative device. “When building the device, we needed to look into the future and determine what kind of information we would want to collect in the clinical environment that maybe wouldn’t be leveraged immediately. Our goal was to minimize hardware changes and focus on firmware/software upgrades based on the sensing data we were collecting.”
