Abstract
Bed sores, a common problem among immobile patients occur as a result of continuous sweating due to increase in skin to bed surface temperature in patients lying on same posture for prolonged period. If left untreated, the skin can break open and become infected. Currently adopted methods for bed sores prevention include: use of two hourly flip chat for repositioning patient or use of air fluidized beds. However, the setbacks of these preventive measures include either use of costly equipment or wastage of human resources. This paper introduces an intelligent low cost FPGA based anti-sweating system for bed sores prevention in a clinical environment. The developed system consists of bed surface implanted temperature sensors interfaced with an FPGA chip for sensing the temperature change in patient’s skin to bed surface. Based on the temperature change, the FPGA chip select the - mode (heater/cooler) and speed of the fan module. Furthermore, an alarm module was implemented to alert the nurse to reposition the patient only if patient’s skin to bed surface temperature exceeds a predefined threshold thereby saving human resources. By integrating the whole system into a single FPGA chip, we were able to build a low cost compact system without sacrificing processing power and flexibility.
Highlights
Statistics have shown that about one million people in the United States suffer from bed sores ranging from mild inflammation to deep wounds, a research done by the Federal Agency reported that bed sores afflict: 10% of hospital patients, 25% of nursing home residents and 60% of quadriplegics [1]
Bed sores occur as a result of increase in skin to bed surface temperature in patient lying on the same posture for prolonged period [7]
This paper introduces an intelligent low cost Field programmable gate array (FPGA) based anti-sweating system for bed sores prevention in a clinical environment
Summary
Statistics have shown that about one million people in the United States suffer from bed sores ranging from mild inflammation to deep wounds, a research done by the Federal Agency reported that bed sores afflict: 10% of hospital patients, 25% of nursing home residents and 60% of quadriplegics [1]. Adopted methods for bed sores prevention include: use of two hourly flip chat for repositioning patient or use of air fluidized beds [2, 3]. A PC controlled automated system to flip the patient every 2 hours to minimise the bed sore has been developed [5]. How ever the current approaches are either expensive or impractical in clinical environment The drawbacks of these preventive measures include wastage of human resources or use of costly equipments. Bed sores occur as a result of increase in skin to bed surface temperature in patient lying on the same posture for prolonged period [7]. This paper introduces an intelligent low cost FPGA based anti-sweating system for bed sores prevention in a clinical environment. By integrating the whole system into a single FPGA chip, we were able to build a low cost compact system without sacrificing processing power and flexibility
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