Why High-Frequency Data Monitoring Matters in the ICU

Understanding a Patient's Condition Means Seeing More Than Averages

In the ICU, patient conditions evolve from minute to minute — sometimes from breath to breath. Yet most monitoring systems still rely on 1-minute or 5-minute averages, losing valuable detail in the process.

Imagine watching a movie by viewing one frame every 10 seconds — you'd miss the plot entirely. That's what happens when ICU teams rely on low-resolution data: subtle instabilities, critical shifts, and brief complications get averaged out or overlooked.

For high-stakes care, you need to see the full picture, in high frequency — not just at the ventilator level, but across the entire physiological environment.

Low-Resolution Data Masks What Matters

Whether it's mechanical ventilation, circulatory support, or metabolic monitoring, low-resolution data can miss the moments that matter most.

A patient might experience:

• A short cluster of double triggering
• A sudden drop in cardiac output
• Transient pressure spikes during renal replacement therapy

These kinds of events can resolve quickly — but have meaningful clinical consequences. If you're only collecting data every few minutes, these insights are lost.

To understand what's really happening, clinicians need access to raw, high-frequency signals — not just simplified trends.

Data Alone Still Isn't the Answer — It Has to Be Useful

Even ICUs that collect high-frequency data often don't use it effectively. That's because collecting data isn't enough. To make it clinically actionable, teams need:

• Real-time access to full waveform and sensor data
• Tools to identify anomalies and trends
• Visualizations that reduce noise, not add to it
• Integration into existing workflows, not extra work

When this layer is missing, even excellent data becomes just another unused archive.

The Good News: Now It's Possible

Until recently, collecting and processing high-frequency data across the ICU felt out of reach. Storage costs, technical limitations, and lack of integration made it impractical.

That's changed. Today, a full day of raw physiological data takes up less space than a short video file. The cost of storage has dropped. Processing power is abundant. And new platforms — like Deep Breath — make it possible to actually use this data in real time.

How Deep Breath Helps

Deep Breath is building a platform for continuous, high-resolution ICU data — collected, processed, and made usable in real time.

We don't just monitor. We make complexity clear.