System to Allow Off Site Monitoring of Pressure Ulcers for Patients in a Rural Long-Term Care Facility

Abstract This phase I will show the feasibility of an imaging instrument to assist an individual caregiver in monitoring deep pressure tissue injuries (DPTIs). Patients that are immobile, are insensate, choose to not move can develop pressure ulcers (PUs). These PUs should be examined for their skin integrity on a frequent basis. This project will develop a system to allow an untrained caregiver to collect visual and thermal images that provide remote wound assessment. The capture of both visual and thermal images provides the benefit of wound assessment for patients with different skin tones including darkly pigmented skin. For the individual caregiver the practical process of obtaining a digital image is very difficult because they normally would use both hands to reposition the patient to get a good field-of-view of the PU. In low-income rural nursing homes with minimal staff, they may not have the ability to both position a patient into a natural light setting and to operate the camera. The innovation is to combine a very miniature thermal image camera and visible image camera on a low-cost head mounted display. This will allow one caregiver to position the patient, aim the imager and acquire the new image of the PU for remote assessment. A smartphone connected with the head- mounted display would send the images to a wound specialist for the remote clinical assessment.