Adherence to a treatment of cranial deformities with a sensorised brace device

Abstract

Positional plagiocephaly, braquicephaly and scaphocephaly are cranial deformations that occur on infants during 4 to 18 months, heads of babies with these deformations are asymmetric and in severe cases they might develop problems with sight and hearing senses as well as chewing and learning skills. The treatment for these deformations in average and severe cases is the use of a custom made helmet that allows the cranium to recover its symmetry; the amount of correction made depends on the total daily hours of usage, becoming a key metric. Currently to know how many hours the helmet is used, parents are www.macrothink.org/npa 73 Network Protocols and Algorithms ISSN 1943-3581 2016 asked every month the total number of hours in average, but this is not an accurate way to register this time of usage. Knowing this value would allow giving a better follow up for each patient and could also estimate the duration of treatment for each case. This work describes an experience based on biomedical and telematics engineering discipline combination, which allows defining a treatment procedure for children between 4 and 18 months old to the diagnosis, helmet design, manufacturing and tracking in a way of registering the adherence during the whole treatment.

Recent Advances on Telematics Engineering

“…The cranial shape will improve over time, with the total daily hours of usage being a key metric to predict the amount of correction, to improve the follow-up for each patient and even to estimate the duration of the treatment. The paper by Antoni Oller et al, entitled "Adherence to a treatment of cranial deformities with a sensorised brace device" [6], proposes the use of a sensorised orthopaedic helmet as a control system allowing the paediatric staff to access reliable and hassle-free information about the parental adherence to the prescribed treatment and correct placement of the orthopaedic device. The proposed system integrates pressure sensors into the helmet and the collected information is processed by a micro controller that is connected to a mobile device via Bluetooth.…”