Intelli-sense bed patient movement sensing and anti-sweating system for bed sore prevention in a clinical environment

Bed sores, a common problem among immobile patients these days occur as blood supply to the skin is cut off in patient lying on same posture for a prolonged period of time. If left untreated, the skin can break open and become infected. Experiments performed demonstrated that the time over which a patient lies in the same posture on the bed is directly proportional to bed surface temperature. Also, increase in bed surface temperature of patients lying on the same posture is one of the key factors for occurrence of bed sores. Therefore, control and reduction of bed surface temperature is one of the vital aspects in clinical environment for prevention of bed sore among patients in tropical condition. Here in this project a low cost system for control of bed surface temperature and monitoring patient movement has been developed for bed sore prevention. 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 intelli-Sense low cost anti-sweating system for bed sores prevention and patient movement detection in a clinical environment. The developed system consists of bed surface implanted temperature sensors along with Inflatable pressure Pad interfaced with a microcontroller for sensing the temperature change in patient's skin to bed surface. Based on the temperature change, the microcontroller selects the flow rate of the air inside the mattress. 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. The system also alerts the nurse if the patient has not moved or the movement is not significant in two hours there by replacing the manual two hour chart By integrating patient movement Sensing and Anti sweating system we were able to build a low cost compact system without sacrificing processing power and flexibility.