A new smart mobile system for chronic wound care management

Nonhealing wounds pose a major challenge in clinical medicine. Typical chronic wounds, such as diabetic foot ulcers and venous leg ulcers, have brought substantial difficulties to millions of patients around the world. The management of chronic wound care remains challenging in terms of precise wound size measurement, comprehensive wound assessment, timely wound healing monitoring, and efficient wound case management. Despite the rapid progress of digital health technologies in recent years, practical smart wound care management systems are yet to be developed. One of the main difficulties is in-depth communication and interaction with nurses and doctors throughout the complex wound care process. This paper presents a systematic approach for the user-centered design and development of a new smart mobile system for the management of chronic wound care that manages the nurse's task flow and meets the requirements for the care of different types of wounds in both clinic and hospital wards. The system evaluation and satisfaction review was carried out with a group of ten nurses from various clinical departments after using the system for over one month. The survey results demonstrated high effectiveness and usability of the smart mobile system for chronic wound care management, in contrast to the traditional pen-and-paper approach, in busy clinical contexts

Telehealth Wound Applications: Barriers, Solutions, and Future Use by Nurse Practitioners

Telehealth applications are an emerging technology in a new era of health care system technologies. Although telehealth technologies, including a number of different applications, are used by various members of the health care team, nurse practitioners (NPs) utilize them for a variety of patient issues across healthcare settings. The Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne Computer Science Department has recently developed a wound scanning application, WoundView for nurse practitioners to utilize in different healthcare settings. Such telehealth mobile applications are used in clinics, home health, rural, and remote settings where a physician may not be readily available. However, there are obstacles with the current practice of using telehealth technologies such as a dire need for evidence-based research that supports attainable solutions for these barriers. Extensive, ongoing research will allow NPs to anticipate an immense mainstream implementation of telehealth applications in the very near future

Mobile Health Technologies

Mobile Health Technologies, also known as mHealth technologies, have emerged, amongst healthcare providers, as the ultimate Technologies-of-Choice for the 21st century in delivering not only transformative change in healthcare delivery, but also critical health information to different communities of practice in integrated healthcare information systems. mHealth technologies nurture seamless platforms and pragmatic tools for managing pertinent health information across the continuum of different healthcare providers. mHealth technologies commonly utilize mobile medical devices, monitoring and wireless devices, and/or telemedicine in healthcare delivery and health research. Today, mHealth technologies provide opportunities to record and monitor conditions of patients with chronic diseases such as asthma, Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Diseases (COPD) and diabetes mellitus. The intent of this book is to enlighten readers about the theories and applications of mHealth technologies in the healthcare domain

An mHealth Technology for Chronic Wound Management

Increasingly, mobile consumer electronic devices are able to make meaningful applications in healthcare, and this chapter discusses the development of a mHealth app called SmartWoundCare, designed to document and assess chronic wounds on smartphones and tablets. Pressure ulcers (bedsores) were selected as the application area for SmartWoundCare due to their pervasiveness in healthcare and their associated impacts on patients’ quality of life and mortality, and electronic documentation is considered as an important intervention in pressure ulcer prevention and treatment. The chapter reviews the design of SmartWoundCare on Android and iOS platforms. Its benefits over paper‐based charting include automatically generated wound histories in graph and text formats, alerts and notifications for user‐set conditions, wound image galleries, and positioning for telehealth consultation by transmitting wound data across sites. The mobile app was implemented in a user trial in a long‐term care facility in Winnipeg, Canada, and the user trial illuminated that a key benefit of SmartWoundCare was the ability to take wound photographs. This feature had benefits for patients as well as caregivers. Consequently, algorithms were developed to analyse wound images for size and colour to provide additional indicators of wound progression

Mobile Wound Assessment and 3D Modeling from a Single Image

The prevalence of camera-enabled mobile phones have made mobile wound assessment a viable treatment option for millions of previously difficult to reach patients. We have designed a complete mobile wound assessment platform to ameliorate the many challenges related to chronic wound care. Chronic wounds and infections are the most severe, costly and fatal types of wounds, placing them at the center of mobile wound assessment. Wound physicians assess thousands of single-view wound images from all over the world, and it may be difficult to determine the location of the wound on the body, for example, if the wound is taken at close range. In our solution, end-users capture an image of the wound by taking a picture with their mobile camera. The wound image is segmented and classified using modern convolution neural networks, and is stored securely in the cloud for remote tracking. We use an interactive semi-automated approach to allow users to specify the location of the wound on the body. To accomplish this we have created, to the best our knowledge, the first 3D human surface anatomy labeling system, based off the current NYU and Anatomy Mapper labeling systems. To interactively view wounds in 3D, we have presented an efficient projective texture mapping algorithm for texturing wounds onto a 3D human anatomy model. In so doing, we have demonstrated an approach to 3D wound reconstruction that works even for a single wound image

Smartphone as a Personal, Pervasive Health Informatics Services Platform: Literature Review

Objectives: The article provides an overview of current trends in personal sensor, signal and imaging informatics, that are based on emerging mobile computing and communications technologies enclosed in a smartphone and enabling the provision of personal, pervasive health informatics services. Methods: The article reviews examples of these trends from the PubMed and Google scholar literature search engines, which, by no means claim to be complete, as the field is evolving and some recent advances may not be documented yet. Results: There exist critical technological advances in the surveyed smartphone technologies, employed in provision and improvement of diagnosis, acute and chronic treatment and rehabilitation health services, as well as in education and training of healthcare practitioners. However, the most emerging trend relates to a routine application of these technologies in a prevention/wellness sector, helping its users in self-care to stay healthy. Conclusions: Smartphone-based personal health informatics services exist, but still have a long way to go to become an everyday, personalized healthcare-provisioning tool in the medical field and in a clinical practice. Key main challenge for their widespread adoption involve lack of user acceptance striving from variable credibility and reliability of applications and solutions as they a) lack evidence-based approach; b) have low levels of medical professional involvement in their design and content; c) are provided in an unreliable way, influencing negatively its usability; and, in some cases, d) being industry-driven, hence exposing bias in information provided, for example towards particular types of treatment or intervention procedures

The Use of Online Applications to Improve Chronic Wound Care in Primary Care; A Literature Review

Abstract Background: Chronic wounds are a major burden on patients, health care professionals, and the healthcare system. Primary care professionals need to be prepared with the information and skills that will help them perform high-quality wound care. Objective: The purpose of this manuscript is to assess the use of mobile applications to support health care providers in primary care who care for patients with chronic wounds. Data Sources: A review of the evidence was performed using CINAHL, Cochrane/ DARE, PubMed, Ovid, and Evidence-Based Journals to explore the consequences of using online wound care applications by primary care practitioners. Conclusions: The literature showed that using smartphone applications in wound management had positive outcomes. The professionals who access the software apps were better equipped to provide wound management than those who were not. Implications for practice: Wound care smartphone applications would allow primary care providers to overcome time stress by accessing resources needed for evaluating, recognizing, and treating wounds. Keywords: Wound care, wound management, wound assessment, measurement, documentation, mobile application