Woundcare
What is Woundcare?
We are developing a smartphone application for wound assessment that leverages the power of 3D scanning and artificial intelligence to provide accurate, consistent, and efficient wound assessment for healthcare professionals and patients alike.
Why is it needed?
Chronic wounds are more likely to affect the elderly population because of factors such as aging, which causes the skin to become thinner and in turn slows down wound healing, nutrition, obesity, chronic diseases such as diabetes or cardiovascular conditions, and how much trauma certain areas of the body have experienced. 3% of the population 65 years or older have open wounds, and because the number of older people is rising, chronic wounds will continue to rise. Medicare estimated that the cost of acute and chronic wound treatments was between $28.1 billion to $96.8 billion, the highest expense being surgical wounds, followed by diabetic ulcers. In the U.S., the annual cost of wound care was about $2.8 billion (2014).
Current methods for wound assessment and documentation have several drawbacks:
- Rulers and visual estimation: inconsistent and subjective
- Transparent film: time-consuming
- Digital cameras: require training, reference marker, and not seamless
- Smartphone camera imaging: requires training, the reference marker
- External hardware and tablet-compatible hardware: inaccessible/expensive? and impractical for a telehealth approach