PressureSmart: Innovating Prevention, Early Detection & Management of Pressure Injuries
Supporting pressure injury prevention, early detection, healing and monitoring.
Project Overview
Updated September 9, 2024
The Problem
Pressure injuries (PIs), also known as bedsores or pressure sores, affect 26% of patients across Canadian health care settings.1 PIs further degrade quality of life for patients often already experiencing severe illness or debility at their most vulnerable, and require costly and long hospitalizations to address. In the United States alone, over 2.5 million people develop PIs, resulting in 60,000 preventable deaths and care costs of up to $26B.2
Early and systematic detection of PIs can allow clinicians to institute therapies that not only prevent them, but also various other complications frequently associated with PIs like pneumonia, sepsis, delirium and muscle wasting. Unfortunately, current PI prevention, detection, intervention, and treatment is labor intensive and time consuming for clinicians and caregivers; with patients at moderate to high risk of developing PIs needing to be physically repositioned every 2 hours.
How We Are Solving It
Led by Medtronic in collaboration with Rehabtronics, Swift Medical, Thrive Health, Amii, Excelar, and Providence Health Care Ventures, this project will deliver and commercialize an innovative solution to support PI prevention, early detection, healing and monitoring.
PressureSmart will aim to allow clinicians and caregivers in hospital, long term care or home settings to track when patients will be required to be turned to a new position to prevent PIs. Artificial intelligence (AI)-powered camera technology will be used to monitor patients in multiple settings to understand the conditions which makes them highly susceptible to PIs leading to improved strategies for prevention and cure.
Whereas previously a care provider would be required to turn a patient every 2-3 hours, without knowing if they were in the last position for 5 minutes or the last 3 hours; this AI-powered solution would be able to track the patient’s position and personalize the protocol for that specific patient or patient population. If a PI starts occurring or continues to develop due to lack of oxygen, regional tissue oxygen levels can be increased by tissue stimulation for combining earlier detection and intervention methods. Tracking wound characteristics helps with selecting the most appropriate intervention, while the patient is guided through the process via an app designed to facilitate tailored treatment journey knowledge and promote treatment compliance.
The PressureSmart solution will also improve the workflow of several current methods to reduce the clinical staff burden, making the solution more scalable to meet the growing demands for hospital care due to an aging population.
The unique expertise and technologies of the consortium partners will be integrated to seamlessly address these potential aspects of PI prevention and care:
- Medtronic as the world’s largest medical device company with deep connections in acute care, critical technology and AI expertise in patient posture monitoring and quantification using touchless sensors.
- Rehabtronics as a leader in neurostimulation with clinical expertise in PIs, patient recovery and mobility.
- Swift Medical’s AI-based digital wound care solution for early detection, intervention and monitoring.
- Thrive Health’s patient engagement platform to streamline care coordination and support end-to-end patient journeys with personalized care.
- Amii as a national leader in ML and AI research.
- Excelar’s Careflow platform, comprised of Orchestrator, Timeline, and Insights, will support the project. Orchestrator connects patient data across consortium partners’ platforms, AI models, and hospital systems. Timeline offers clinicians patient timeline data visualization. Insights provides observational analytics for AI model evaluation, tuning, and governance, as well as de-identified data for clinical research and quality improvement.
- Providence Health Care as the health innovation leader providing clinical needs and expertise, health and clinical informatics technological interoperability, data governance and access to real-life operational settings with patients in acute and long-term care for incubation, co-design, co-development and validation.
The result will be a ‘plug-and-play’ solution for health care organizations to maximize PressureSmart to best suit their needs. It will not only address the technical and clinical aspects of PI management, but also place a strong emphasis on patient-centered care, aiming to improve outcomes, enhance the quality of life and reduce the overall burden on healthcare systems. Ultimately, this project will unify the capabilities of Canadian digital health technology innovators into a world class solution that addresses PIs as a critical and preventable issue in patient care.
