Objective Pressure Injury Risk Assessment Using A Wearable Pressure Sensor

The healthcare industry has placed significant effort on reducing pressure injuries as they often occur while patients are seeking treatment for an unrelated condition, lengthen the stay of the patient, impact treatment options, are extremely painful, and can result in death. Current work has shown that an increase in nursing care can reduce pressure injury occurrence, but increased nursing care is not sustainable. The Braden Scale is the current method of stratifying patients by risk of forming a pressure injury, but previous work has shown that the Braden Scale is not an accurate predictor of pressure injury formation. We present an objective mobility measure of pressure injury risk that can be used in addition to the Braden Scale using a wearable pressure-sensing device. By assessing the current pressure readings in real-time we can determine when a patient is mobile and present this data to the clinic. In future we aim to use this mobility measurement in a Cloud-based system that can compare the mobility measurements to similar patients to assess risk with increased accuracy.