A Portable System for Fast and Accurate Non-Contact Wound Assessment

Documenting wounds is important to drive better patient outcomes and more efficient care. Capturing a wound image as part of the patient record provides valuable information of a wound during the healing process. Augmenting this with measurement of wound area and size allows quantitative tracking of the wound healing progression.

Portable devices (tablets/phones) are becoming deployed across many healthcare settings to document patient data. The cameras on these mobile devices can capture images but, in themselves, do not allow measurements to be made. Additionally when capturing information on these devices there is concern with data association (ensuring the captured image is correctly associated with a patient) and data privacy (ensuring data cannot be accessed without suitable safeguards).

Planimetry approaches allow measurements to be calculated from a captured photo. One standard way of achieving this is to place a marker near to the wound, allowing the marker to be detected to provide an image scaling. In general, this marker is a consumable with challenges related to supply, distribution, storage and disposal. There are unwanted increases in assessment time, especially for larger wounds where placement of the marker becomes difficult. The use of a marker also greatly increases the risk to both the patient and health provider due to the increased contamination risk.

We present a mobile device based wound documentation system that allows capture of wound photos and other wound documentation. The system also employs a custom designed hardware module that affixes to the rear of the device. Working in conjunction with an app, this allows accurate and repeatable measurements to be obtained from the images without the use of any markers placed within the scene. The app also works in conjunction with a central repository to allow for safe and controlled storage of the images, measurements, and other wound information.