The box is placed at the beginning of the hour, although there is no way to know at what time during the hour the nurse made the observation. 17 Auto-correlation is a mathematical measurement of the degree to which an observation is influenced by the prior observation. Clinical homeostasis is the condition when a patient s system is in balance. Most patients in our study showed various levels of auto-correlation at different times in their oxygen saturation measurements. The researchers believe that this is an issue relative to understanding the meaning of these data.
Oxygen saturation is measured to the nearest whole percent.
As oxygen saturation approaches 100 percent saturation, the measurement preciseness seems to effect the data behavior. Examination of Figures 2 through 4 leads to only one conclusion, that a single sample per hour is not an adequate representation of the patient's vital signs during throughout the hour. Current procedure provides only a fraction of the information available from today's monitors. The electronic data varied in a range from 90 to 100 percent. The nurse also recorded numbers within this range, yet, the correlation coefficient between the value the nurse recorded and the electronically recorded data is 0.2603, that is an r2 of 0.0677.