EME Electric Supervision Embedded on Gas Panel with Microshock Dangerousness Degree

Medical teams have the support of Electromedical Equipment (EME) during surgery procedures. The benefits are countless and a great part of them play vital roles to patients. To assure the patient safety, Clinical engineering teams manage the EME and execution procedures of corrective and preventive maintenance. However, the monitoring of EME during their use in patients needs to be improved, especially when considering microshock events. These shocks can be undetectable to the medical team, because the value of the electric current is under the human perception threshold of 1.0 mA, for most part of the population. In this paper we propose an innovative solution to electrical supervision of EME. The proposed solution was implemented in a device responsible for such supervision and embedded in a real gas and outlet panel in a hospital. Different experiments was conducted in a real hospital scenario and the analysis of results demonstrates that the only microshock risk alert is insufficient for supervision. However, it constitutes an important step to attempt a complete supervision solution. Hence this work contributes significantly to advance the state of the art in microshock detection and electric supervision. As a consequence, the paper propose a microshock dangerousness scale based on the RMS value of differential current is proposed.