Mitigation of Pressure Injuries: Inertial Wearable and Computer Vision Approaches

Overview

Pressure ulcers, or pressure injuries (PIs) are localized areas of skin and/or underlying tissue decay that typically occur over bony prominences due to prolonged pressure or friction. These ulcers can range from a pink spot on the skin to exposed bone and tissue and can lead to increased morbidity and mortality. Detection and prevention of PIs is currently done manually by healthcare staff, necessitating an alternative approach to screening. The objective is to develop a tool that can identify the predispo sitions for PIs and create low -cost assistive devices for the individuals at highest risk. Identifying patients at highest risk is done using MIT’s MIMIC -III database of demographic and clinical features of a large patient data set, combined with data analytics and machine learning. Only the variables available in the first 48 hours of admission are used in the model. Mitigation is done using two complementary devices that help track the patient’s position in a hospital bed. The first is a non -invasive camera monitoring system, and the second is an inertial wearable based on a microcontroller and gyroscope/accelerometer. These two devices detect and track the time a patient has been turned and alert to the need to reposition the patient to relieve pressure points. This project developed a novel, highly accurate three-prong approach to PI mitigation. It is tested and achieved over 93.5% accuracy on the modeled data, 99.5% mAP score on the wearable device, and 99.5% detection of position and movement in the camera-based non-invasive system. Maryland