(Press-News.org) An estimated 4 million children undergo surgical procedures in hospitals across the United States each year. Although postoperative complications, such as infections, can pose significant health risks to kids, timely detection following hospital discharge can prove challenging.
A new study published in Science Advances — and led by researchers at Shirley Ryan AbilityLab, the Ann and Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago and University of Alabama at Birmingham — is the first to use consumer wearables to quickly and precisely predict postoperative complications in children and shows potential for facilitating faster treatment and care.
“Today, consumer wearables are ubiquitous, with many of us relying on them to count our steps, measure our sleep and more,” said Arun Jayaraman, PT, PhD, the study’s senior author, a scientist at Shirley Ryan AbilityLab and professor at Northwestern Medicine. “Our study is the first to take this widely available technology and train the algorithm using new metrics that are more sensitive in detecting complications. Our results suggest great promise for better patient outcomes and have broad implications for pediatric health monitoring across various care settings.”
As part of the study, commercially available Fitbit devices were given to 103 children for 21 days immediately after appendectomy — the most common surgery in children, which results in complications up to 38% of the time. Rather than just using the metrics automatically captured by the Fitbit to identify signs of complications (e.g., low activity, high heart rate, etc.), Shirley Ryan AbilityLab scientists trained the algorithm using new metrics related to the circadian rhythms of a child's activity and heart rate patterns.
In the process, they found such metrics were more sensitive to picking up complications than the traditional metrics. In fact, in analyzing the data, scientists were able to retrospectively predict postoperative complications up to three days before formal diagnosis with 91% sensitivity and 74% specificity.
“Historically, we have been reliant upon subjective reporting from children — who often have greater difficulty articulating their symptoms — and their caregivers following hospital discharge. As a result, complications are not always caught right away,” said Fizan Abdullah, MD, PhD, who conducted the research while serving as an attending physician of pediatric surgery at Lurie Children’s and a professor at Northwestern Medicine. “By using widely available wearables, coupled with this novel algorithm, we have an opportunity to change the paradigm of postoperative monitoring and care — and improve outcomes for kids in the process.”
This research is part of a four-year, National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded project. As a next step, scientists plan to transition this approach into a real-time (vs. retrospective) system that analyzes data automatically and sends alerts to children’s clinical teams.
“This study reinforces wearables’ potential to complement clinical care for better patient recoveries,” said Hassan M.K. Ghomrawi, PhD, MPH, vice chair of research and innovation, Department of Orthopaedic Surgery at University of Alabama at Birmingham. “Our team is eager to enter the next phase of research exploration.”
END
Stepping up the potential of wearables: predicting pediatric surgery complications
New research shows devices like Fitbits can more quickly and accurately predict complications
2025-07-09
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
Prenatal and childhood lead exposure linked to faster memory decay in children
2025-07-09
New York, NY — July 9, 2025 — A study led by researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai shows that exposure to lead during pregnancy and early childhood may accelerate the rate at which children forget information—a critical marker of memory impairment that may have implications for learning and development.
Using delayed matching-to-sample task (DMTS)—a cognitive task that can be used to evaluate underlying neurobehavioral functions, such as attention and working memory, and has been demonstrated to be sensitive to metal neurotoxicants—the study examined how both prenatal ...
Medical needles in the hands of AI
2025-07-09
Imagine a physician attempting to reach a cancerous nodule deep within a patient's lung – a target the size of a pea, hidden behind a maze of critical blood vessels and airways that shift with every breath. Straying one millimeter off course could puncture a major artery, and falling short could mean missing the cancer entirely, allowing it to spread untreated.
This is the high-stakes reality physicians face in thousands of procedures daily, where accuracy is critical and the task is complicated by anatomical obstacles that are non-penetrable or sensitive. Can artificial intelligence (AI) and robots help address these challenges and ...
Source criticism in school requires more than isolated interventions
2025-07-09
Strengthening school students’ resilience to disinformation requires more than isolated interventions on source criticism. A new study from Uppsala University shows that short teaching interventions on disinformation have no long-term effect on upper secondary school students’ ability to distinguish between credible and misleading news.
The results are now published in the scholarly journal PLOS One and are based on a study of 459 Swedish upper secondary school students.
The study, supported by the Swedish Institute ...
Mount Sinai’s Andy Jagoda, MD, receives top honor from New York chapter of the American College of Emergency Physicians
2025-07-09
Andy Jagoda, MD, Professor of Emergency Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine of Mount Sinai, has received the prestigious Edward W. Gilmore Lifetime Achievement Award from the New York Chapter of the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP). He was presented with this honor Wednesday, July 9, at the New York ACEP Scientific Assembly in Bolton Landing, New York.
This award honors Dr. Jagoda for his significant contributions to the field through education, leadership, mentoring, and advancing the quality of emergency care. It recognizes Dr. Jagoda’s lifelong commitment to, and lasting impact on, the specialty of emergency medicine ...
Clinical trials reveal promising alternatives to highly toxic tuberculosis drug
2025-07-09
The drugs, sutezolid and delpazolid, have demonstrated strong antimicrobial activity and a notably better safety profile compared to linezolid, with potential to replace this current cornerstone in the treatment of drug-resistant TB. The findings were published on July 8, 2025, in two peer-reviewed articles in The Lancet Infectious Diseases, one of the world’s leading journals in the field of infectious disease medicine. Research partners in Germany included the German Center for Infection Research (DZIF), Munich, ...
Vanderbilt Health at forefront of improving head and neck surgery with fluorescence imaging to ‘light up’ nerves
2025-07-09
For the first time, a fluorescent-guided nerve imaging agent shows promise for use in humans, according to a paper published in Nature Communications. The study sought to evaluate the safety of bevonescein, a synthetic peptide-dye conjugate thought to be applicable for intraoperative nerve-specific fluorescence imaging.
Eben Rosenthal, MD, chair of the Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, served as the paper’s senior and corresponding author, and Sarah Rohde, MD, MMHC, division chief of Head and Neck Surgery, is ...
Koalas spend only 1% of their life on the ground – but it’s killing them
2025-07-09
Koalas are a nationally endangered and iconic species in Australia, yet their populations are rapidly declining due to habitat loss, fragmentation, and disease, and very little is known about the fine-scale movements of koalas – especially when they’re on the ground. New research reveals that koalas only spend around 10 minutes per day on the ground, but this ground-time is associated with two-thirds of recorded koala deaths.
“Koalas are mostly tree-dwelling, but due to extensive land clearing, they’re increasingly forced to travel on the ground, which puts them at serious risk of injury and death,” ...
Moon-Rice: Developing the perfect crop for space-bases
2025-07-09
The future of sustained space habitation depends on our ability to grow fresh food away from Earth. The revolutionary new collaborative Moon-Rice project is using cutting-edge experimental biology to create an ideal future food crop that can be grown in future deep-space outposts, as well as in extreme environments back on Earth.
Modern space exploration relies heavily on resupplies of food from Earth, but this tends to be largely pre-prepared meals that rarely contain fresh ingredients. To counteract the negative effects that the space ...
Forum with alcohol industry ties shows significant bias in reviews of health research
2025-07-09
A new study, published in Addiction, shines a light on how industries associated with health harms—such as tobacco, fossil fuels, and in this case, alcohol—can distort the evaluation of scientific research through industry-friendly commentary.
A team of researchers led by UVic’s Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research (CISUR), analyzed 268 critiques of alcohol and health studies published online since 2010 by the International Scientific Forum on Alcohol Research, or ISFAR.
ISFAR describes themselves as an international group of “invited physicians and scientists who are specialists in their fields and committed ...
Underestimated sources of marine pollution
2025-07-09
Plastic waste pollutes oceans across all regions of the world. Marine animals may become entangled in larger plastic debris such as nets and bags or mistake smaller pieces for food. Ingested plastic can block or injure the gastrointestinal tract. The smallest plastic particles in the micro and nano range are mostly excreted, but a small proportion can pass through the intestinal wall and enter the bloodstream.
So how much nanoplastic is actually present in the oceans? Most scientific attention has so far been focussed ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
From injury to agony: Scientists discover brain pathway that turns pain into suffering
Molecular simulations show graphite ‘hijacks’ diamond formation through unexpected crystallization pathways
Scientific breakthrough uses cold atoms to unlock cosmic mysteries
First-of-its-kind journal facilitates rapid publication of AI research
AI tool helps improve detection of cardiac amyloidosis
Loneliness predicts poor mental and physical health outcomes
Keeping the photon in the dark
FDA-approved drugs could make nano-medicine safer, study finds
Many seafloor fish communities are retaining their individuality despite human impacts
Somali women’s perspectives on female genital mutilation and its abandonment
Structure of tick-borne virus revealed at atomic resolution for the first time
The robot will see you now
Stepping up the potential of wearables: predicting pediatric surgery complications
Prenatal and childhood lead exposure linked to faster memory decay in children
Medical needles in the hands of AI
Source criticism in school requires more than isolated interventions
Mount Sinai’s Andy Jagoda, MD, receives top honor from New York chapter of the American College of Emergency Physicians
Clinical trials reveal promising alternatives to highly toxic tuberculosis drug
Vanderbilt Health at forefront of improving head and neck surgery with fluorescence imaging to ‘light up’ nerves
Koalas spend only 1% of their life on the ground – but it’s killing them
Moon-Rice: Developing the perfect crop for space-bases
Forum with alcohol industry ties shows significant bias in reviews of health research
Underestimated sources of marine pollution
IPK research team unlocks potential of barley’s closest wild relative, Hordeum bulbosum
Study reveals the hidden benefits of weight loss on fat tissue
Gut microbes key to understanding how exercise boosts cancer immunity
Morning vs bedtime dosing and nocturnal blood pressure reduction in patients with hypertension
BMI in children before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic
Branching out: Tomato genes point to new medicines
Charité study analyzes 400 million years of enzyme evolution
[Press-News.org] Stepping up the potential of wearables: predicting pediatric surgery complicationsNew research shows devices like Fitbits can more quickly and accurately predict complications