Hua Rui, Carter Michela, O'Brien Megan K, Pitt J Benjamin, Kwon Soyang, Manworren Renee C B, Oscherwitz Gia, Edobor Arianna, Chen Austin, Ghomrawi Hassan M K, Abdullah Fizan, Jayaraman Arun
Shirley Ryan AbilityLab, Chicago, IL 60611, USA.
Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University, Chicago, IL 60611, USA.
Sci Adv. 2025 Jul 11;11(28):eadv2643. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.adv2643. Epub 2025 Jul 9.
Postoperative complications pose substantial health risks to children who undergo surgery, yet timely detection of complications after discharge is challenging due to reliance on subjective symptom reports from children and caregivers. Alternatively, wearable devices can provide objective health measurements for continuous recovery monitoring, potentially enabling earlier complication detection in the hospital or community. This study examined biorhythm-based metrics (circadian and ultradian rhythms, derived from the daily activity and heart rate patterns recorded by a consumer wearable) and their relationship to postoperative recovery in children with and without complications. Wearables were given to 103 children for 21 days immediately after appendectomy, and biorhythm metrics were extracted from per-minute data. A machine-learned model using these metrics retrospectively predicted postoperative complications up to 3 days before formal diagnosis with 91% sensitivity and 74% specificity. Our findings suggest that wearable-derived biorhythms offer a promising, unobtrusive method for evaluating postoperative recovery. This approach has broad clinical implications for pediatric health monitoring across various care settings.
术后并发症对接受手术的儿童构成了重大健康风险，但由于依赖儿童及其照顾者的主观症状报告，出院后及时发现并发症具有挑战性。相比之下，可穿戴设备可以提供客观的健康测量数据，用于持续的康复监测，有可能在医院或社区中更早地发现并发症。本研究考察了基于生物节律的指标（昼夜节律和超日节律，源自消费级可穿戴设备记录的日常活动和心率模式）及其与有并发症和无并发症儿童术后恢复情况的关系。在103名儿童阑尾切除术后立即给予他们可穿戴设备，为期21天，并从每分钟的数据中提取生物节律指标。使用这些指标的机器学习模型在正式诊断前3天就能回顾性预测术后并发症，灵敏度为91%，特异性为74%。我们的研究结果表明，可穿戴设备得出的生物节律为评估术后恢复提供了一种有前景的、不引人注意的方法。这种方法对各种护理环境下的儿科健康监测具有广泛的临床意义。
