Procedural sedation is rapidly growing all over the world for various kinds of diagnostic and therapeutic procedures otherwise associated with discomfort. In Europe alone, several million procedural sedations are carried out each year.
Although procedural sedation is so commonplace it is not a simple task. According to a recent survey most of the anaesthesia professionals reported difficulties keeping patients sedated at just the right level without their becoming too superficial, causing discomfort and obstructing the procedure, or too deep, inducing a blocked airway calling for rapid and appropriate action. Increasing numbers of procedural sedation, as driven by demand, are now being provided outside hospitals, often by non-anaesthesia professionals.
In some cases, even anaesthesia professionals cannot rapidly acheive manual airway control without obstructing the procedure, e.g. if the procedure requires the patient's head or neck to be covered in sterile dressings or during magnetic resonance tomography. Out-of-hospital medical care centers often lack appropriately trained personnel and the adequate monitoring equipment for the provision of safe and qualified procedural sedation. We therefore aim to develop a solution that can help in these circumstances.