Abstract

Spinal cord Injury can have a debilitating and traumatic effect on affected individuals. The impact is far reaching, including emotional, physical, economic, and social. This impact is not only on the affected individuals, but also their family members, caregivers and the society as well. Prevalence of pressure ulcers was found to be 33.9% in patients with quadriplegia, 47.4% in patients with paraplegia, and 9.6% in patients who had hemiplegia. Pressure ulcers are a debilitating and undesirable complication of traumatic spinal cord injury, that can be prevented using wearable sensors and mobile devices. Weight offloading is one of the recommended solutions to prevent pressure ulcers. Our team designed and developed a mobile application that was tied to a pressure sensor mat, used to track and monitor weight offloading. Our sensor-based system was designed to measure two outcomes - one, verify weight offloading and two- to investigate if prompting an individual can help them remember to weight offload. Our analysis showed that most patients remember to perform weight offloading exercises with initial assistance of technology. We designed a new threshold-based algorithm for our sensor-based system to detect weight offload called COMpredict. The prediction accuracies of the algorithm are relatively high with approximately 90% of accuracy for most weight shifting tests and 70.49% for wheelchair push up test.

Keywords: Sensors; Spinal Cord Injury; Trauma; Pressure Ulcers; Weight Shifting; Prompting; Prevention of Pressure Ulcers; Mobile App

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