An Enhanced Sensing Application Based on a Flexible Projected Capacitive-Sensing Mattress

Abstract

This paper presents a cost-effective sensor system for mattresses that can classify the sleeping posture of an individual and prevent pressure ulcers. This system applies projected capacitive sensing to the field of health care. The charge time (CT) method was used to sensitively and accurately measure the capacitance of the projected electrodes. The required characteristics of the projected capacitor were identified to develop large-area applications for sensory mattresses. The area of the electrodes, the use of shielding, and the increased length of the transmission line were calibrated to more accurately measure the capacitance of the electrodes in large-size applications. To offer the users comfort in the prone position, a flexible substrate was selected and covered with 16 × 20 electrodes. Compared with the static charge sensitive bed (SCSB), our proposed system-flexible projected capacitive-sensing mattress (FPCSM) comes with more electrodes to increase the resolution of posture identification. As for the body pressure system (BPS), the FPCSM has advantages such as lower cost, higher aging-resistance capability, and the ability to sense the capacitance of the covered regions without physical contact. The proposed guard ring design effectively absorbs the noise and interrupts leakage paths. The projected capacitive electrode is suitable for proximity-sensing applications and succeeds at quickly recognizing the sleeping pattern of the user.

Approaches that use software to support the prevention of pressure ulcer: A systematic review

“…Contact with the monitoring equipment might reduce patient's comfort and implies that the equipment must be properly sanitized or replaced when the patient being monitored changes. Yet, as show in Table 4, none of the approaches consider the hygiene of the monitoring equipment and only four of them [5,20,11,39] briefly discuss patient's comfort.…”

“…Six of them [21,36,17,9,5] cites they use low cost equipment. Yet, only in [39] price details are provided.…”

“…They are installed along the mattress and can identify the amount of pressure exerted on them by the patient's body. This technology is used by twenty-six of the approaches, more specifically, the ones presented in [2,14,7,23,21,6,39,15,35,34,27,28,41,40,4,11,13,26,36,17,37,12,9,22,20,5].…”

“…Patient's comfort is issued in four of the selected articles: [5,20,11,39]. This is an important issue, since contact with the monitoring equipment might compromise comfort when the patient is lying on the bed.…”

“…In the article, a tablet is used to receive data from the microcontroller via bluetooth and displays a map of intensity of the pressure over the patient'presents a pressure sensitive sheet and a framework for recognition of body position. The sheet is composed of a comfortable textile material which is able to generate pictures of high pressure intensity resolution used by a classifier for recognizing the position of the body 2014[5] Chang et alAn enhanced sensing application based on a flexible projected capacitive-sensing mattress A system composed of a flexible sensing mattress capable of measuring the distribution of pressure is presented. The system displays an intensity map based on the pressure data which can be used by the health professionals to determine the patients position in…”