Diseño e implementación de un sistema de monitorización de cambios posturales empleando sensores inerciales para la prevención de úlceras por presión

Abstract

Today there is a heavy workload in health systems; the staff is not too aware of patients and their needs. Such is the case of bedridden patients with limited mobility who require different positioning during the day. Not doing this promotes the appearance of skin lesions known as pressure ulcers, potentially affecting the patient’s health and even their quality of life in the long term. With this in mind, this work proposes the design and implementation of a system that monitors the position of bedridden patients to alert medical personnel and thus prevent the appearance of pressure ulcers. The system comprises an adjustable artifact on the patient’s chest that contains an electronic device capable of capturing angular components according to the patient’s position. The data obtained is processed through the k-NN classification algorithm, obtaining positional information. This information is visible from a web application that allows real-time patient monitoring. The system is evaluated in healthy people and patients, with encouraging results regarding posture classification. The classifier’s performance is very high according to the statistical analysis of the experimental results. Since people are not prone to a large amount of movement and since the angular values that determine each position are sufficiently separated in the scatterplot, the position reported by the device in all cases is equal to the actual position of the person.