Measuring Repositioning in Home Care for Pressure Injury Prevention and Management

Despite the widespread agreement on the need for the regular repositioning of at-risk individuals for pressure injury prevention and management, adherence to repositioning schedules remains poor in the clinical environment. The situation in the home environment is likely even worse. Our team has developed a non-contact system that can determine an individual’s position in bed (left-side lying, supine, or right-side lying) using data from a set of inexpensive load cells placed under the bed. This system was able to detect whether healthy participants were left-side lying, supine, or right-side lying with 94.2% accuracy in the lab environment. The objective of the present work was to deploy and test our system in the home environment for use with individuals who were sleeping in their own beds. Our system was able to detect the position of our nine participants with an F1 score of 0.982. Future work will include improving generalizability by training our classifier on more participants as well as using this system to evaluate adherence to two-hour repositioning schedules for pressure injury prevention or management. We plan to deploy this technology as part of a prompting system to alert a caregiver when a patient requires repositioning.