This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project aims to build a system that enhances understanding of the patient's body pressure characteristics, such that it can provide assistive/cognitive support to hospital staff to prevent pressure ulcer. The intellectual merit of this project is an enabling technology that integrates analytics within a software platform for monitoring, prevention and management of pressure ulcers. Research efforts will focus on implementation of modules for whole-body pressure distribution data collection, posture classification, limb tracking, risk assessment, turning schedule utilization and patient status reporting. The anticipated result of this project is a software platform that can be employed as an assistive technology tool by caregivers for monitoring at-risk patients more effectively. This platform will work well with the pressure mat systems in the market, with the following abilities: (i) to receive data (raw pressure images) collected from pressure mats by customers (e.g. hospitals) in a HIPPA-compliant server; (ii) to apply image processing/enhancement techniques on uploaded data so that the analytics can run with a reasonable accuracy; and (iii) to provide key analysis data that improves caregiver cognition of the status of patient and assist them in making informative decisions for risk assessment and ulcer prevention. The broader impact/commercial potential of this project will be to create a commercially viable software package for monitoring, prevention and management of one of the most costly, acute health conditions, pressure ulcers - or bed sores. Unfortunately, conventional techniques have not been very successful due to overworked nursing staff who frequently miss turning patients, scarcity and high cost of special mattresses and pressure map systems and more importantly difficulty of interpreting pressure images by nurses/doctors. Statistics show that 11-23% of the patients in hospitals and nursing homes (3-6 million) in the United States develop pressure ulcers that cost our healthcare system more than $1.2 billion annually. Pressure ulcers represent an enormous burden on our healthcare system, in general, and an enormous problem for healthcare providers (e.g. hospitals and assisted-living homes) in particular. This SBIR proposal has the potential to have a significant impact by offering an important technology to the healthcare community. The potential societal and commercial impact includes: (a) effective ulcer prevention that will dramatically enhance quality of life and reduce patient suffering and discomfort; and (b) significant decrease in ever-escalating healthcare cost related to pressure ulcers
