An Intelligent FPGA Based Anti-Sweating System for Bed Sore Prevention in a Clinical Environment

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.

A systematic review of movement monitoring devices to aid the prediction of pressure ulcers in at‐risk adults

“…Most studies (70%, N = 16) included patients, 23,[25][26][27][29][30][31][32][33][35][36][37][38][39][40]42,46 while other studies involved healthy participants alone 28,34,41,44 and both patients and healthy participants. 3,43 The mean sample size was 144 (SD = ±397), ranging from 2 38 to 1812.…”

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

“…For monitoring the patient's body temperature and humidity, all approaches use sensors installed in the mattress which are capable of measuring the intensity of temperature or humidity. Seven approaches perform monitoring of temperature [32,7,16,6,18,17,12] and four of them perform the monitoring of moisture [35,7,6,30]. The technologies used to monitor risk factors and the amount of approaches that employ them are shown in Fig.…”

“…To indicate prolonged exposure to pressure, three approaches use light and sound alerts [38,6,37] and one of them uses text messages [36]. To indicate high temperature, four of them use sound and light signals [16,6,18,17].…”

“…Three approaches perform the body temperature management using a similar method [16][17][18]. They make use of a ventilation system composed of pipes installed under the mattress which cools it with a stream of cold air.…”

“…Effectiveness was issued in twelve of the selected articles: [16,6,15,34,18,27,41,40,26,36,17,28]. Yet, no randomized control trials were applied to verify the approach effectiveness.…”