A HW/SW framework emulating wearable devices for remote wound monitoring and management

Chronic wounds form a emerging hospitalization factor especially for elderly people. More than 10 million people in Europe suffer from chronic wounds, a number which is expected to grow due to the aging of the population. In order to address chronic wound management, SWAN-iCare project aims to develop a smart wearable and autonomous negative pressure device for wound monitoring and therapy. In this paper, we present a hardware-software framework for emulation, early functional prototyping and exploration of such wearable medical devices targeting to remote wound management. We analyze the requirements, the HW components and SW architecture for developing a realistic emulation platform for the specific application domain. We show that utilizing the proposed framework several architectural configurations can be explored in terms of performance and resource usage that can be further used as valuable feed-back during the design of the medical device.