gears and light bulb
2021

Pressure injuries develop when someone has been in the same immobile position for an extended period of time. Currently, healthcare workers follow a cycle in which they rotate patients every two hours in order to alleviate and change where the pressure is on the body. However, this cycle is based on old traditions and not founded in science, so it frequently not enough to prevent the development of pressure injuries.

Our solution uses a neural network to create a digital pressure map of a person using only a depth camera. Once this pressure map is created, our algorithm will calculate the risk of pressure injury based on time and pressure. When the calculated pressure injury risk surpasses a predefined threshold, our app will send an alert to nurses or nursing home workers telling them to move the patient off of the at-risk body part. Our app will contain the patient's health information, graphs of pressure data, and a colored pressure map so that nurses can see areas of risk in greater detail. This will allow healthcare workers to be much more efficient in their rotation of patients, and allow the rotations to be patient-specific so that the risk of developing a pressure injury is significantly decreased.

Team: Charles Hong, Arkin Worlikar, Christino Panetta, Michael Sweeney, Nathan Adair, and Sripushkar Julapally

Project Files