Smoothing Effect in Vital Sign Recordings: Fact or Fiction? A Retrospective Cohort Analysis of Manual and Continuous Vital Sign Measurements to Assess Data Smoothing in Postoperative Care

摘要

BACKGROUND:Data smoothing of vital signs has been reported in the anesthesia literature, suggesting that clinical staff are biased toward measurements of normal physiology. However, these findings may be partially explained by clinicians interpolating spurious values from noisy signals and by the undersampling of physiological changes by infrequent manual observations. We explored the phenomenon of data smoothing using a method robust to these effects in a large postoperative dataset including respiratory rate, heart rate, and oxygen saturation (Spo2). We also assessed whether the presence of the vital sign taker creates an arousal effect.