VirtuSense VSTOne
VSTOne is VirtuSense's acute care product, an in room sensor system that predicts when a hospital patient is about to leave their bed or chair unassisted and alerts staff before it happens. It belongs in this category for a reason worth stating plainly: bed alarms are the canonical alarm fatigue problem in hospital nursing, and this product is built and sold entirely in those terms. A single LiDAR based sensor is deployed per room, described as part of a multi modal stack that also includes infrared imaging, microphones, real time location sensing and an optical pan tilt zoom element. Computation runs locally at the bedside rather than transmitting video to external servers. The system interprets spatial data as clinical context rather than discrete motion events, identifying the subtle postural shifts that precede a deliberate attempt to stand, and issues an alert roughly 31 to 65 seconds before the exit occurs. That advance warning is the entire product thesis: a conventional bed pad alarm fires once the patient has already gone, which is too late to prevent anything. VirtuSense positions VSTOne against the performance of existing bed and chair pads directly, stating that conventional pad accuracy can be as low as 15 percent, that nursing staff encounter 20 to 30 false alarms per bed each day, and that its own system achieves 98 percent fewer false alarms and a 99.99 percent accuracy rate, with organisations seeing an average 74 percent reduction in falls with injury. None of these figures is accompanied by a denominator, a definition or a published method. The product is described as covering eight use cases from one device, with fall risk and pressure injury named explicitly, and as fully integrated with Epic, with alerts logged in the platform and written to the electronic health record. Group level reporting covers fall trends by unit or site over time. The company's earlier products remain separate: VSTBalance, launched in 2014, performs a two minute LiDAR based gait, balance and function assessment, and VSTAlert serves skilled nursing and assisted and independent living. This record is scoped to VSTOne, the acute inpatient product, consistent with this index's practice of indexing by product and with the setting boundary that places residential and long term care fall monitoring outside this category. Pricing is not published.
Capability Axes
The inference is the product, and the distinction from the other sensor vendor in this category is instructive. Biobeat's sensor produces cleared physiological measurements that stand on their own with or without a model. A LiDAR sensor in a hospital room produces nothing a clinician can use until a model interprets it: the value is entirely in inferring intent to stand from subtle postural change, several seconds before the movement itself. Apply this index's standard test and the answer is unambiguous, since removing the model leaves a depth sensor and no product. Trained on a stated corpus exceeding 1.5 million hours across the product family.
Described as fully automated and autonomously monitoring, but the action taken is always to notify a human: an alert reaches the assigned nurse and the floor console within a second, and a contingency protocol escalates to the wider team if nobody responds. That escalation path is a genuine oversight feature rather than a marketing line, because it addresses what happens when an alert is missed, which most vendors here leave unstated. Sensitivity is configurable by patient risk level and by time of day, with distinct prevention and detection modes, so the institution rather than the vendor sets the posture. THE SUPPRESSION QUESTION APPLIES HERE MORE DIRECTLY THAN ANYWHERE ELSE IN THIS CATEGORY, because suppression is the headline claim: 98 percent fewer alarms means the system is deciding, tens of times per bed per day, not to notify anyone. That is the fourth instance of this pattern in this lane, after Affineon auto handling normal labs, CLEW labelling patients low risk and AlertWatch filtering alerts. Ask what proportion of suppressed events preceded an actual fall.
Mechanism is described with unusual specificity for this market. The sensing stack is enumerated as LiDAR with infrared imaging, microphones, real time location sensing and an optical pan tilt zoom element; computation is stated to run locally at the bedside rather than in a remote cloud; the inference target is named precisely as postural shifts preceding volitional movement rather than the movement itself; and the training corpus is quantified at over 1.5 million hours. AN UNRESOLVED CONTRADICTION SITS IN THE SAME MATERIAL AND IT MATTERS BECAUSE IT UNDERPINS A PRIVACY CLAIM: the company markets monitoring without cameras and states its sensors do not capture faces or sounds, while the VSTOne product description lists an infrared camera, microphones and an optical pan tilt zoom camera in the sensor stack. These may be reconcilable, since depth and infrared sensing are not conventional video and some components may be optional, but the vendor does not reconcile them. Held at B also because no model class, validation methodology or accuracy derivation is published.
THIS VENDOR PUBLISHES THE RIGHT METRICS AND NONE OF THEIR DERIVATIONS, WHICH IS A PRECISE FINDING RATHER THAN A GENERIC COMPLAINT. It is the only vendor in this category that publishes all three of the measures this category exists to ask for: a lead time, stated as 31 to 65 seconds before bed exit; an alert burden, stated as 0.5 false alerts per day for the sibling product; and an accuracy figure, stated as 98 percent for VSTAlert and 99.99 percent for VSTOne. The shape of the disclosure is exactly what this index asks of every vendor here. The substance is unverifiable. No denominator accompanies the false alert figure, no definition explains what accuracy is measuring or over what population, the two accuracy numbers differ across products with no methodology for either, and 99.99 percent on a rare event is close to meaningless without a breakdown by error type. The comparative claims about conventional bed pads, at as low as 15 percent accuracy and 20 to 30 false alarms per bed per day, are asserted without a source. The headline outcome, an average 74 percent reduction in falls with injury, has no comparison group, time period or denominator. No peer reviewed evaluation was located. Publishing a number invites the methodology question, which is the same paradox this index recorded against Pieces.
The best privacy position among the sensor vendors in this category, and it is architectural rather than promissory. Computation runs locally at the bedside rather than streaming video to external servers, which removes the largest exposure surface a room monitoring product would otherwise create. The company states its sensors detect movement without capturing faces or sounds and markets the approach as dignified monitoring for patients who would refuse a camera in the room, which is a real clinical consideration rather than a slogan. HIPAA compliance is asserted. Held at B rather than A for two reasons: the sensor stack described for VSTOne includes an infrared camera, microphones and an optical pan tilt zoom element, which sits awkwardly against the no cameras and no sounds claim and is nowhere reconciled, and no privacy policy, retention statement or training data provenance disclosure was located for a system trained on over 1.5 million hours of patient room observation.
HIPAA compliance is asserted repeatedly and prominently, described as 100 percent compliant, but no business associate agreement posture is published: no statement of whether a BAA is executed as standard, on what terms, at what cost, or with what subprocessor disclosure. Graded C rather than Not Rated because a claim is made and can be assessed, and a bare compliance assertion without BAA terms is the weak rung of this index's HIPAA ladder. The local processing architecture would materially shape any such agreement, which makes the absence of published terms more noticeable rather than less.
No SOC 2 of any type, HITRUST, ISO 27001, trust centre or report request path was located. Not Rated means no public evidence was found rather than evidence of weakness. Worth noting that the edge computing architecture reduces but does not remove the question, since alerts, logs and electronic health record writes still traverse the hospital network and a management console aggregates room level status across a floor.
No FDA clearance was located for VSTOne or for the product family, and none is claimed. That is not necessarily a gap, since a system that alerts staff to imminent bed exit may fall outside device regulation depending on how its outputs are framed, and the company does not present the product as diagnosing or predicting a clinical condition. But the position is entirely undocumented: nothing published states the regulatory basis on which the product operates, and the accuracy and outcome claims made in marketing are of a kind that would ordinarily attract scrutiny if the product were regulated. Establish the regulatory rationale directly, particularly for the pressure injury use case, which sits closer to a clinical assessment than bed exit alerting does.
No subgroup performance, calibration or fairness analysis is published. ONE GENUINE ADVANTAGE IS WORTH RECORDING BECAUSE IT DISTINGUISHES THIS VENDOR FROM THE OTHER SENSOR PRODUCTS IN THIS CATEGORY: depth based LiDAR sensing does not rely on optical absorption through skin, so it does not share the photoplethysmography pigmentation mechanism that affects Biobeat across every parameter and Etiometry through its oxygenation input. That is a real structural difference rather than a claim the vendor makes. The exposures here are different in kind and equally unexamined: an inference trained on movement patterns may perform differently for patients with contractures, tremor, limb amputation, high body mass, mobility aids in the bed, unusual bedding, or atypical room layouts, and nothing published reports performance across any of these. Given the product is trained on over 1.5 million hours of observation, the composition of that corpus is the question, and it is not described.
The strongest integration claim among the sensor vendors in this category, and the only one that names an EHR. VSTOne is described as fully integrated with Epic, with each alert logged immediately both in the platform and written to the electronic health record, alongside onsite performance integrations. Writing alerts back to the record rather than holding them in a parallel system is the property that matters, because it puts the event in the document a clinician and a quality reviewer will actually look at. Unit and site level reporting on fall trends over time extends that into quality workflow. Held at B because no marketplace listing, Showroom entry or partner review credential was retrieved to corroborate the Epic claim, no other EHR is named, and no FHIR or interface detail is published.
Simple by design and that simplicity is the practical argument. One LiDAR based sensor per room, no wearable on the patient, no dependency on the hospital's existing monitoring estate, and computation local to the bedside. Alerting reaches assigned staff on mobile devices, a floor console and a management kiosk, with room assignment, shift tracking and real time room status handled in the same interface, so the operational wrapper is described rather than assumed. The company publishes sizing guidance for its long term care product, recommending coverage of 20 to 25 percent of beds rather than all of them, which is unusually candid commercial advice and implies a targeting rather than blanket deployment model. Held at B because no acute hospital customer is named beyond a general reference to several hospital systems, no implementation timeline is published, and no data residency statement exists beyond the local processing claim.
No pricing published at any level: no per sensor, per room, per bed or per unit cost, no platform subscription, no band and no implementation fee. The per room hardware model makes the unit of pricing consequential, since cost scales directly with rooms covered and the company's own sizing guidance implies partial rather than full deployment. ONE COMMERCIAL MECHANISM IS WORTH RECORDING AND IT IS THE SECOND INSTANCE OF A PATTERN IN THIS CATEGORY: VirtuSense partners with an underwriting firm to bring the tools to post acute facilities, mirroring the arrangement in which a professional liability insurer subsidises PeriGen's maternal safety product. An insurer participating in distribution is a meaningful third party signal about expected loss reduction, and it is also a route to affordability that a licence fee comparison misses.
This record is scoped to the acute inpatient product, and that scoping is itself the setting statement. VSTOne serves hospital inpatient rooms, while the sibling product VSTAlert serves skilled nursing and assisted and independent living, which fall outside this category's setting boundary, the same boundary that keeps SafelyYou in home care operations rather than here. Within acute care the coverage is condition agnostic rather than specialty specific, since the system monitors any patient in any monitored room rather than a clinical population, with fall risk and pressure injury named among a stated eight use cases. Held at B because the remaining use cases are not enumerated anywhere retrieved, no exclusions are published for patients or room types where the sensing does not work, and a product that infers from movement plainly has such limits even though none are stated.
Pricing
Vendor-published figures are labeled as such. Figures labeled “Estimated” are derived from third-party sources and have not been confirmed by the vendor.
| Entry Price | Pricing Basis | BAA Tier | Implementation | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
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Not published
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Not published; per room sensor hardware model | Not published | Not published | Vendor Published |
No pricing published at any level: no per sensor, per room, per bed or per unit cost, no platform subscription rate, no band and no implementation fee. The unit of pricing matters more than usual here because the model is per room hardware, so cost scales directly with rooms covered rather than with patients or licences. The company's own published sizing guidance for its long term care product recommends covering 20 to 25 percent of beds rather than all of them, which is candid and implies a targeted deployment economics rather than blanket coverage; establish whether the same guidance applies in acute care and how partial coverage is priced. A distribution partnership with an underwriting firm brings the tools to post acute facilities, mirroring the arrangement in which a professional liability insurer subsidises PeriGen's maternal safety product, so ask whether any equivalent insurer supported route exists for hospital purchasers.