messages, such as map directions or search results, in a side corner of the user’s field of vision.
Evena’s glasses were designed as an improvement on the company’s own Evena OWL product, a 10-inch tablet version of the multi-spectral vein imaging system that was launched in early 2013. The tablet, which can be connected to a rolling computer cart, is positioned over the area of the patient’s body where the veins are sought for an IV. The OWL, however, requires nurses to swivel their heads between the patient and the tablet screen, Ball said. And nurses are also tired of the thicket of carts that crowd hospital rooms, he told me.
“They call it ‘the forest,’ ’’ Ball said. Evena’s glasses, which are powered by a battery pack on a belt worn by the nurse, can send images of the patient’s veins to hospital electronic records systems via Bluetooth, 3G, or Wi-Fi.
A nurse whose comment I found in a Web search wondered whether Evena’s glasses would work on patients with darker skin—a factor that can make IV insertion harder.
Ball said the device can look through denser skin pigment to detect the veins. The company also has a solution for overweight patients. Evena’s glasses, as well as the OWL system, have an accessory that uses ultrasound to reveal veins located farther beneath the skin surface.
An IV needle is intended to penetrate one wall of a vein to reach the inside of the vessel. But one common problem with inserting the needle is that it can go straight through and puncture the back wall of the vein as well. The consequences of this “double-wall stick” may not be detected for hours, Ball said. In the meantime, blood leaks out of the hole into the surrounding tissues. This can cause swelling, pain and inflammation. And a portion of any drug being delivered through the IV may also leak out, leaving the patient undermedicated.
With the Evena glasses, nurses can detect a double-wall puncture immediately, Ball said. In the 3D image of the vein, the edge of the back wall will blur, and the blood flowing out of the hole will show a cauliflowering pattern, he said.
Even when an IV has been inserted successfully, nurses must check every eight hours to make sure the vein has maintained a good rate of flow, Ball said. To do this, nurses traditionally inject a clear slug of saline solution through the IV, and then feel the arm for the small bulge as the salty fluid moves down the vein. It’s a pretty subjective test.
“These saline slug tests are big time consumers for the nurses,” Ball said.
With the Evena glasses, a nurse can immediately see the slug of clear salt water moving through the vessel, pushing the darker blood ahead of it, Ball said.
Evena hopes to persuade hospitals and clinics that its glasses will save them both time and money. Gruebele estimates that if a typical 200-bed US hospital adopted the glasses in routine practice, its initial outlay would be about $500,000. But the savings could be as much as $2.3 million a year in increased efficiency, needle kit costs, labor, and the avoidance of IV-related complications that can extend hospital stays for patients, Gruebele said.
Ball said the company collected a backlog of pre-orders during its demo weeks, and plans to be ready for full production of the glasses by April. Evena announced recently that a medical products distributor in China has placed a $6.4 million order.
Even if hospitals are interested, however, Evena executives know that winning over nurses is the key to mass adoption. They have to find the glasses easy to use. Gruebele said the company has been spending more time recently on the ergonomics and miniaturization of the product than it has on the core imaging technology.
“The physics is the easy part,” Gruebele said.
Before Evena developed its Eyes-On glasses, the company had considered making wearable vein-finder devices in the form of a hat or helmet, Gruebele said. But the designers realized that nurses didn’t want to scare their patients by appearing like some sort of alien visitor. They also didn’t want their hair to end up looking like a fright wig every time they took off the helmet.
The glasses Evena developed can be worn over a health care worker’s own prescription glasses, but future models will be able to incorporate corrective lenses, Gruebele said. Beyond that, Evena plans to amp up the fashion sense of the glasses, and even their “sexiness,” he said.
Hearing that, I started thinking about a futuristic movie plot with hordes of glamorous high-tech Draculas wearing these things.
“How do you keep this out of the hands of vampires?” I actually asked the chief executive officer of a Silicon Valley medtech company.
Ball didn’t miss a beat.
“They’re our best customers,” Ball said.
Here’s an Evena video explaining the system; watch for the vein visualization at 0:41.
