Abstract
Healthcare treatments might benefit from advances in artificial intelligence and technological equipment such as smartphones and smartwatches. The presence of cameras in these devices with increasingly robust and precise pattern recognition techniques can facilitate the estimation of the wound area and other telemedicine measurements. Currently, telemedicine is vital to the maintenance of the quality of the treatments remotely. This study proposes a method for measuring the wound area with mobile devices. The proposed approach relies on a multi-step process consisting of image capture, conversion to grayscale, blurring, application of a threshold with segmentation, identification of the wound part, dilation and erosion of the detected wound section, identification of accurate data related to the image, and measurement of the wound area. The proposed method was implemented with the OpenCV framework. Thus, it is a solution for healthcare systems by which to investigate and treat people with skin-related diseases. The proof-of-concept was performed with a static dataset of camera images on a desktop computer. After we validated the approach’s feasibility, we implemented the method in a mobile application that allows for communication between patients, caregivers, and healthcare professionals.
Highlights
Digital cameras and cameras embedded in mobile devices increase the quality and resolution of the images captured [1,2], allowing for powerful solutions for different areas of human life [3,4]
The results provided by our app are exciting, but problems related to the distance between the camera and the mobile device remain in the process of being solved
This paper shows the implementation of a method for measuring a wound area using different image processing techniques
Summary
Digital cameras and cameras embedded in mobile devices increase the quality and resolution of the images captured [1,2], allowing for powerful solutions for different areas of human life [3,4]. The emergence of studies related to healthcare and technology is increasing, and it is participating in the new era of medicine related to patient empowerment [5]. Patient empowerment is a concept that gives methods and equipment at low cost to patients to help them take care of their health in remote contact with their healthcare professional [6,7]. The use of standard mobile devices with different cameras allows for less invasive and low-cost solutions [10]
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