Bed posture classification for pressure ulcer prevention

Pressure ulcer is an age-old problem imposing a huge cost to our health care system. Detecting and keeping record of the patient´s posture on bed, help care givers reposition patient more efficiently and reduce the risk of developing pressure ulcer. In this paper, a commercial pressure mapping system is used to create a time-stamped, whole-body pressure map of the patient. An image-based processing algorithm is developed to keep an unobtrusive and informative record of patient´s bed posture over time. The experimental results show that proposed algorithm can predict patient´s bed posture with up to 97.7% average accuracy. This algorithm could ultimately be used with current support surface technologies to reduce the risk of ulcer development.