UC Santa Cruz

We present PIMAP, a system framework for continuous patient monitoring with a specific focus on preventing pressure injuries (a.k.a. bed sores). Pressure injuries are classified as “never events”, meaning they should never occur in healthcare facilities and yet in the U.S. they affect 2.5 million patients a year at a cost of $2.5 billion. In addition the majority of patients affected are the most vulnerable, the elderly and/or physically disabled.

There are many proposed solutions to prevent pressure injuries, the most promising are patient monitoring based, such as monitoring the pressure of the patient against a mattress, monitoring the motion of the patient, and measuring the health of the patient’s skin. Patient monitoring has the advantage that data can be automatically collected and analyzed without healthcare intervention, providing additional insights that would otherwise have to be calculated manually or ignored.

Through the identification of the most promising techniques and through anecdotal evidence from our collaboration with UCSF we discovered a lack of a reliable way to sense, store, analyze, and visualize novel medical device data. There is no current system that is able to: (1) seamlessly, reliably, and persistently acquire patient monitoring data from various medical devices, (2) analyze acquired data, and (3) present the results to healthcare personnel in an ecient and user-friendly fashion. Instead there are many one-off solutions that will only work with a specific medical device or commercial systems that only work with a commercial medical device.

From this motivation we present Pressure Injury Monitoring And Prevention (PIMAP), a system framework that presents a standard to sense, store, analyze, and visualize medical sensor data in real-time. The framework abstracts the system so that researchers can focus their efforts on specifics, such as the medical device or analysis without having to develop an entire system.