Journal_1_2014_final_WEB

Innovation, know how and technolgy in wound care
Development of tools
for home monitoring
in wound care
Introduction
In recent years there has been an increased focus
on getting patients out of the hospital and back
into their own homes as soon as possible. To reach
these goals, technologies that enable and assist this
transfer have been developed.
In the case of wound care, some patients with
complicated hard-to-heal ulcers end up needing
hospitalisation for their condition. There are
many reasons for hospitalisation; however, some
patients who require negative pressure wound
therapy (NPWT) are hospitalised simply because
they require constant monitoring and immediate
access to wound care specialists. This means that
the total health care costs for the application of
NPWT in this particular group of patients are
relatively high despite decreasing prices of the
NPTW systems themselves. Recently, portable
NPWT systems have been developed and commercialised,
providing several advantages for the
patients such as discreteness and ease of operation.
With the ever-increasing trend to allow patients to
leave the hospital environment as soon as possible,
smaller, simpler, and more patient-friendly devices
have been developed over the last few years.
However, these devices still only offer the single
service of negative pressure on the wound and
basic vacuum control.
SWAN-iCare project
To enable monitoring and treatment of patients in
their own home environment or long term care,
the SWAN-iCare project aims to develop a Smart
Negative Pressure Device (SNPD) (Figure 1). This
device will integrate non-invasive sensors that allow
objective, continuous, real-time monitoring
of critical parameters with personalised therapy
tailored to supporting the patient’s wound condition.
In addition, the device will have the potential
to remotely release active agents to assist in
the wound healing process. To facilitate distant
monitoring and support provided by centralised
specialists to patients being cared for outside of the
hospital environment, the device will be equipped
with information and communication technologies
(ICT).
The SWAN-iCare device will:
n Collect data and monitor several wound
parameters via non-invasive integrated
micro-sensors
n Offer the opportunity to provide innovative
personalised therapy in combination with
the negative pressure wound therapy
n Allow health care providers to be remotely
aware of the patient’s condition and receive
alerts highlighting situations that require
direct actions
Target Groups for SWAN-iCare NPWT
The device is expected to be used primarily by patients
with diabetic foot ulcers (DFU) or venous
leg ulcers (VLU).
Marco Romanelli,
MD PhD
Assistant Professor
Dept. of Dermatology
University of Pisa, Italy
Marie Muller, MD
Dpt. of Diabetology
Grenoble University
Hospital, France
www.swan-icare.eu
Conflict of interest: none
Chronic ulcerative skin lesions affect approximately 1.5% of the
population and represent a considerable medical and social problem.
The patient affected by this pathology is generally geriatric
and likely to suffer from concomitant illnesses. Chronic ulcers
have different causes and can be divided into the following main
categories: vascular ulcers (venous, arterial, mixed), diabetic foot
ulcers, pressure ulcers, and ulcers of different aetiology. The above
pathologies refer to chronic and invalidating conditions that profoundly
affect the patients’ quality of life and often lead to psychological
disorders such as depression.
New treatments for these pathologies have led to improvements
in lesion management and in the quality of assistance provided by
medical and paramedical staff, but methodologies for monitoring
lesions have not kept pace with this progress.
Effective and accurate monitoring of skin lesions should be
performed by measuring the complete status and evolution of the
skin lesion in an objective, precise, and reproducible way. The
main goal of the SWAN-iCare project is to design a system that
can monitor the qualitative and quantitative evolution of a skin
lesion with an easy-to-use technological system.
EWMA Journal 2014 vol 14 no 1 63