Influence of the World Wars on Vital Sign Monitoring Technology

Editor—Large-scale international conflicts during the 20th century acted as important catalysts for innovation and the development of new technologies. This inevitably had lasting effects on medicine, including paving the way for improved approaches to monitoring human physiology. Here we discuss how modern-day capnography, pulse oximetry, and temperature measurements were all born in part through technological inventions necessitated by evolving approaches to warfare during World War I (WWI) and World War II (WWII).