It’s a definite milestone for Infirmary Integrated now that the cardiac monitor simulator is complete. Completely functional, complete with all the features I initially envisioned it to have, completely usable in the classroom.
So what’s new? For starters, a lot of polishing was done to the user interface, more cardiac rhythms were added (pulsed vs pulseless ventricular tachycardia, coarse vs fine ventricular fibrillation, monomorphic vs polymorphic ventricular tachycardia), more waveforms were added (central venous pressure, pulmonary artery catheter), and the ability to save and load simulation files.
So what’s the next step? Porting Infirmary Integrated to Mac OS X so that all future versions will simultaneously be released for Windows and Mac!!
Central venous pressure waveform only populates on beats with atrial contractions, similarly pulmonary artery and arterial blood pressure waveforms only populate on ventricular contractions.
With this new website, I would like to introduce Infirmary Integrated, an advanced cardiac monitor simulator that I have been developing for use as a teaching tool in medical and nursing education. Monitoring a patient’s vital signs and hemodynamic status is key in emergency and critical care medicine, so it is important for clinicians to be practiced at reading echocardiograms and interpreting vital signs. For this, Infirmary Integrated can be a priceless tool for teaching and practicing reading waveforms and interpreting a patient’s status based on monitoring.
22+ cardiac rhythms can already be selected, and more can be modeled with additional options (e.g. STEMI, T-wave inversions, coarse vs. fine ventricular fibrillation).
Infirmary Integrated is free and open source software. As a critical care nurse, I wanted to create a teaching tool that I would have found useful when I was a student- and to make sure it is accessible to students and teachers without being limited by price or accessibility. My goal was to create a piece of software that could be utilized across the world in simulation labs or on personal computers for practice and learning, to better prepare nurses to care for critically ill patients with advanced techniques and equipment.
Infirmary Integrated simulates patient monitoring realistically, digitally simulating 22+ cardiac rhythms and additional waveforms, showing tracings from all 12 ECG leads and various hemodynamic monitoring devices, and realistically displaying the data as a real cardiac monitor would in any monitored hospital unit.
Although development continues on Infirmary Integrated, at its current version, it is still a usable teaching tool. Future plans are to include simulated devices including a 12 lead ECG, defibrillator, intra-aortic balloon pump (IABP), and ventilator- hopefully within the coming months. If you are interested in using Infirmary Integrated, you can download an installation package from the Github repository. Note that Infirmary Integrated is only available on Windows- I do have distant future plans to port it to other operating systems and devices, but those plans are very distant.
12 ECG leads and many devices can be drawn as tracings in Infirmary Integrated.
If you have any questions about Infirmary Integrated regarding its use, development, or any bugs you may encounter with it, please feel free to contact me at ibi.keller [at] gmail [dot] com
Thank you,
Ibi Keller, MSN, RN, CCRN, CEN
Electrical and mechanical capture is differentiated, for realistic blood pressure and oximetry waveforms generated from ectopic beats. Respiratory rhythms are modeled, in addition to cardiac rhythms.
