Overview
Pressure injuries are localized damage to the skin and/or underlying tissue that usually occur
over a bony prominence. Pressure injuries most commonly develop in individuals who have
low-mobility, such as those who are bedridden or confined to a wheelchair and consequently are
attributed to some combination of pressure, friction, shear force, temperature, humidity, and
restriction of blood flow and are more prevalent in patients with
chronic health problems. Although we have witnessed
unprecedented advances in medicine and health care, pressure injuries remain a major patient care
problem and, in fact, are classified as “never events’’
as they should never occur in a healthcare facility.
This project will make significant contributions to pressure injury eradication by developing a
low-cost, patient-centric system to
persistently and autonomously monitor factors that can cause pressure injury occurrence, and
automatically detect conditions favorable to pressure injury formation, giving visual feedback on
which areas are at risk, and alerting medical healthcare staff accordingly.
Publications
(In Progress) Pressure Injury Monitoring Technologies Literature Survey
(In Progress) Cyber-Physical Systems Modeling Of Low-Mobility Patients
Collaborators
Sam Mansfield
Katia Obraczka
Shuvo Roy
SIP 2016
We are working with the Science Internship Program here at UCSC to introduce research to high school interns. For the Summer of 2016 we had two high school interns, Akshaya Vemuri and Aditya Kankariya, help us develop Over The Air (OTA) programming for our sensor network.