A mHealth Application for Chronic Wound Care: Findings of a User Trial

Abstract

This paper reports on the findings of a user trial of a mHealth application for pressure ulcer (bedsore) documentation. Pressure ulcers are a leading iatrogenic cause of death in developed countries and significantly impact quality of life for those affected. Pressure ulcers will be an increasing public health concern as the population ages. Electronic information systems are being explored to improve consistency and accuracy of documentation, improve patient and caregiver experience and ultimately improve patient outcomes. A software application was developed for Android Smartphones and tablets and was trialed in a personal care home in Western Canada. The software application provides an electronic medical record for chronic wounds, replacing nurses’ paper-based charting and is positioned for integration with facility’s larger eHealth framework. The mHealth application offers three intended benefits over paper-based charting of chronic wounds, including: (1) the capacity for remote consultation (telehealth between facilities, practitioners, and/or remote communities), (2) data organization and analysis, including built-in alerts, automatically-generated text-based and graph-based wound histories including wound images, and (3) tutorial support for non-specialized caregivers. The user trial yielded insights regarding the software application’s design and functionality in the clinical setting, and highlighted the key role of wound photographs in enhancing patient and caregiver experiences, enhancing communication between multiple healthcare professionals, and leveraging the software’s telehealth capacities.

Clinical decision support systems in hospital care using ubiquitous devices: Current issues and challenges

“…Manual article/hard copy-based "tools" and "scales" are being automated with easy to use graphical user interface (GUI) via smartphone apps to integrate advanced technologies into medical settings. For example, a smartphone wound care application 16 was developed to replicate the paper-based pressure ulcer scale for healing (PUSH tool), 17 Braden scale, 18 and the Bates-Jensen tool. 19 This system automated the existing tools and allowed clinicians create, view, access, delete, and re-assess patient records relating to wound care.…”

“…There was a very strong perceived correlation between the paper-based forms and the wound care application in terms of content and data entry expectations, with scores of 4.60/5.00 for the Braden Scale and 4.57/5.00 for the PUSH tool. 16 Future CDS apps must leverage existing capabilities from the sophisticated features (hardware and software) of the ubiquitous devices and integrate them with electronic patient health records. 20 Healthcare information could be uploaded to the cloud where observations from various ubiquitous devices would be integrated.…”

Wound Area Assessment using Mobile Application

“…The mobile applications for estimating the wound area have a lot of research that explain the benefits of these applications (Perera and Chakrabarti, 2013;Friesen et al, 2013;Casas et al, 2011). About the method analyzed in the section 3, ruler measures and transparency tracings were used by authors of (Nemeth et al, 2010) for measuring wound size often have low accuracy and reliability and they created a new method used in a wound measurement device (WMD) designed by them.…”

Mobile Health: An Efficient Service to Promote Self-care among People Introducing e-selfcare

“…Outcome: Smart mobile was shown to be appropriate and efficient and could be used for self-care purposes [19].…”