Flexible sensors tested in bedsheets to lessen patient ulcers

Pressure sensors woven into fabrics and clothing are nothing new. But researchers in Atlanta are now testing their use in a fabric that acts like a bedsheet to collect pressure and moisture data from patients lying in bed or sitting in a wheelchair.

That data is then used to predict when a pressure ulcer is likely to occur and understand how long it takes to form.  With that insight, nurses can shift a baby in a neonatal crib or move an elderly patient in a wheelchair to prevent an ulcer. 

The testing is being piloted at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta in a pediatric intensive care unit, with the goal of deploying it in 50 beds and the hope the device becomes universal across healthcare systems.  Pressure ulcers, now known as PIs, affect 2.5 million patients and result in 60,000 deaths a year.  

When a person lies in a single position for too long and begins to sweat, painful sores can form on the body leading to infection or death.  PIs are hard to treat and can develop in a few hours and are hard to treat.   The US spends $27 billion a year on PI medical care, according to the researchers at Georgia Tech working in coordination with Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. It isn’t clear how long it takes a PI to form, so the current medical approach is to manually turn bedridden and critically ill patients every few hours.

Georgia Tech Prof. Sundaresan Jayaraman called the technology being developed “a paradigm shift” because of its implications for better treatments and even lowering healthcare costs.   Jayaraman has collaborated on the work since 2017 with Sungmee Park, principal research scientist at Georgia Tech’s School of Materials Science and Engineering.

One of the biggest challenges in developing the technology was creating flexible and washable sensors as well as making sure it wasn’t intrusive when used with fragile premature babies.  “We needed to make sure all the sensor data was streaming correctly and integrated into the bed, so the sensors don’t disturb either physician’s treatment or the baby’s movement,” Park said in a report from Georgia Tech distributed by Newswise.

After testing early prototypes with dozens of cables connecting to sensors, the researchers innovated a system with just a single cable to each bed. 

Machine learning and predictive analytics are used to study data streaming from each bedside. The system adapts to a patient’s weight and condition and helps nurses know how the pressure on a patient has not changed and how much moisture is present to customize the response. The goal is to create an app to connect to the bedside device to tell nurses when to move a patient. Ultimately, the data could be automatically integrated into electronic medical records. 

Georgia Tech is researching ways to commercialize the sensor fabric for widespread use. “We hope our sensors can made PIs a preventable relic of the past. Commercialization is very, very critical,” Jayaraman said.