A body pressure predictive model in a bed head elevation operation for pressure ulcer prevention

Abstract

Pressure ulcers are caused by tissue damage, which occurs when the blood supply to an area of skin is diminished because of sustained or concentrated pressure on a patient from the mattresses of a bed. Recently, alternative pressure mattress has been proposed to prevent the pressure ulcers. This mattress uses air cells which has a slow response. This causes controlling the air cells to lag behind the change in pressure during the bed head elevation operation. Therefore, this system cannot adequately prevent the concentration of pressure on a patient. To address this issue, we need to predict the change in pressure during the bed head elevation operation and control the pressure based on this prediction. In the current work, we focus on predicting the pressure distribution. We regarded the pressure distribution as an image and predicted the change in pressure by applying a deep neural network. We evaluated the usefulness of the proposed model by experiment with 10 subjects.