Pressure Ulcer Monitoring Platform—A Prospective, Human Subject Clinical Study to Validate Patient Repositioning Monitoring Device to Prevent Pressure Ulcers

Abstract

The objective of this prospective clinical study was to validate two prototype pressure ulcer monitoring platform (PUMP) devices, (PUMP1 and PUMP2), to promote optimal bed repositioning of hospitalized patients to prevent pressure ulcers (PUs). Approach: PUMP1 was a wearable electronic device attached to the patient gown with no skin contact. PUMP2 was a set of four identical electronic devices placed under the patient's bed wheels. A video camera recorded events in the patient room while measurements from the PUMP devices were correlated with true patient repositioning activity. The performance of these PUMP devices developed by our research team were evaluated and compared by both clinicians and engineers. Results: Ten mobility-restricted patients were enrolled into the study. Repositioning movement was recorded by both PUMP devices for 10-2 h and corroborated with video capture. One hundred thirty-seven movements in total were detected by both PUMP1 and PUMP2 over 105 h of capture. Two false positives were detected by the sensors and 11 movements were missed by the sensors. PUMP1 and PUMP2 never conflicted in data collection. Innovation: The presented study evaluated two different sensors' abilities to capture accurate patient repositioning to eventually prevent PU formation. Importantly, detection of patient motion was completed without contact to patient skin. Conclusion: The clinical study demonstrated successful capture of patient repositioning movement by both PUMP1 and PUMP2 devices with 85% reliability, 2 false positives, and 11 missed movements. In future studies, the PUMP devices will be combined with a SMS-based mobile phone alert system to improve caregiver repositioning behavior.

A Review of Intelligent Sensor-Based Systems for Pressure Ulcer Prevention

“…The most common approach, as expected, included some sort of pressure sensors usually placed below the patient's sheets. This does not mean that this approach is the only one successful, as several other methods with satisfactory results are described in the analyzed articles [11,13,18,26]. These include approaches based or complemented by several types of inertial sensors [11,13,18], video images [21,27] and others [26].…”

“…This does not mean that this approach is the only one successful, as several other methods with satisfactory results are described in the analyzed articles [11,13,18,26]. These include approaches based or complemented by several types of inertial sensors [11,13,18], video images [21,27] and others [26]. The fact that pressure sensors do not need to be attached to the patient, are relatively flexible in the information they provide, are easily installed, and can be used successfully with different algorithms for lying position classification seems to have resulted in an increase, over the years, of the number of approaches based on this type of sensor.…”

“…Several approaches use additional sensory information that can be relevant to predict pressure ulcer development. The most common are temperature and humidity sensors [14,17,18,24,28]; however, from the reviewed papers, it seems their information is mostly used to control some form of bed installed actuators (e.g., fans).…”

“…Article [18] compares two different prototype pressure ulcer monitoring platform devices to promote the optimal bed repositioning of hospitalized patients to prevent pressure ulcers. One prototype fits on a patient gown or clothing near the chest and has several sensors: accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer, light sensor, and a thermometer.…”

Portable UWB RADAR Sensing System for Transforming Subtle Chest Movement Into Actionable Micro-Doppler Signatures to Extract Respiratory Rate Exploiting ResNet Algorithm

“…During sleep, when wearable gadgets might be a distraction for the patients, they do not need to be aware of the contactless devices. Force sensor [25], multi-channel infrared sensor arrays [26], load cells [27], vibration sensor [28], pressure sensor [29], and Radio-Frequency (RF) are the most common contactless monitoring devices [30]. One of the most intriguing technologies among all is RF, which takes use of the electromagnetic waves that can be retrieved using RADAR technology.…”