Hoana Medical to Offer First of Its Kind Patient Safety System

HONOLULU, Hawaii--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 10, 2006--Hoana Medical, a leading developer of medical technology for enhancing patient safety, today announced that it has received US FDA 510(k) clearance to begin marketing its flagship product, the LG1(TM) Intelligent Medical Vigilance System(TM). Initially, Hoana will focus sales efforts on the medical-surgical areas of the hospital (also referred to as the general care floor). In the US it is estimated that there are close to 8,000 acute care hospitals with an approximate combined total of 1 million med-surg beds.

The LG1(TM) system is a patient safety technology that tracks heart rate, breath rate and whether the patient is in bed or trying to exit the bed. The technology uses highly-advanced digital signal processing (DSP) software algorithms. As a technology platform, this can ultimately be implemented in a number of applications in healthcare, not only in the acute-care setting, but elsewhere.

“Under a controlled research study in a commercial hospital, clinical testing demonstrated LG1's ability to alert a nurse that a patient was crashing at 3:00am, which may have gone unnoticed until the morning shift. It may have helped save the patient's life.”

Each year 200,000 people die in US hospitals due to medical errors, the equivalent of one in two hundred, compared to one in five million that die annually in aviation accidents. Dr. Patrick Sullivan, CEO of Hoana Medical, states, "Under a controlled research study in a commercial hospital, clinical testing demonstrated LG1's ability to alert a nurse that a patient was crashing at 3:00am, which may have gone unnoticed until the morning shift. It may have helped save the patient's life." Dr. Sullivan further states, "Helping to make a difference in people's lives makes all the work worthwhile. We hope to create a new standard of care in med-surg, providing an affordable, cost-effective solution to the growing national healthcare crisis."

Hoana Medical is a medical device company that develops seamless, invisible sensing technology for patient vigilance. Hoana was founded in 2001 as a spin-off of Oceanit Laboratories, a Hawaii-based engineering, science, and research company. Hoana's PSA(TM) technology was developed for the US military as part of a MEDEVAC platform to measure vital signs under battlefield conditions. For more information, please visit www.Hoana.com, or call 808-523-5410.