Patient-maintained propofol sedation: the anaesthetists' point of view

Many operations within the UK do not require general anaesthesia, and are instead carried out under sedation. A doctor normally provides this, and as the patient is not in control, they may be either under or over-sedated due to a misjudgement of patient anxiety. One solution would be to allow the patients to directly control their own sedation level. This paper presents an invention for innovation (i4i) project developing such a Patient Maintained Propofol Sedation Device (PMPSD). Due to the health risks associated with under and over-sedation, the anaesthetists' interface takes on an added importance to ensure they can oversee the process and intervene when needed. Through the project, a unique opportunity has arisen where anaesthetists have been involved throughout the interface design process, contributing to the development and testing of a prototype. We present this prototype, highlight its key features and how it differs from existing sedation pump interface systems. As the project continues, the interface will be used as part of a clinical trial at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust involving 80 orthopaedic patients throughout the rest of 2018 and into 2019

Bayesian Sensor Resource Allocation

Many tracking and guidance problems may be formulated as a terminating stochastic game in which the distribution of outcomes is affected by the intermediate actions. Traditional techniques ignore this interaction. In this paper we develop an information gathering strategy which maximises the expected gain of the outcome (ie engagement). For example, the objective could be a function of the terminal miss distance and target identity with penalties for missing a valid target or attacking a friendly one. Several trade-offs are addressed: the increased information available from taking more measurements, the fact that an increased number of measurements may adversely affect chance of success (due to alerting target for example) and the fact that later measurements may be more informative but also may be of little use since there may not be enough time available for reaction to this extra information. The problem is formulated so that we are required to choose, under uncertainty, an alterna..