Wound healing monitor

Inspiration

During a visit to a public hospital, I observed a lengthy queue where individuals, including a frail diabetic woman, awaited the attention of a lone nurse. The woman, requiring regular wound care, faced daily challenges with extended queues and a painful visual assessment to prevent infections. The situation highlighted the strain on healthcare services and the difficulties faced by patients in need of consistent medical attention for a minor ailment. I therefore decided to come up with a device that could monitor the wound of such a person to accurately detect infection without the need of a medical practitioner.

What it does

The device has a ph sensor that detects the ph of the wound bed and temperature of the skin surrounding to diagnose a non healing wound. Increased ph and temperature indicate an onset of infection.

How we built it

To monitor the healing of a wound, we needed to monitor parameters such as temperature, pH and humidity. In that case, we used the DHT11 sensor to give us the temperature & humidity parameter and the analog Ph meter to give us the pH readings. We then used a microcontroller (arduino uno) where we programmed an algorithm that will compute the sensor values and tell us if the wound is healing properly. We have also used rfid technology where we used (Rc522 RFID) where the patient can scan the tag and the condition of the wound will be sent to his/her phone via bluetooth(HC-05).

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge was getting the pH,Temperature and humidity sensors that are bio-compatible.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We managed to create the algorithm that will notify the patient about the wound's progress and it worked perfectly.

What we learned

We learned to work with the arduino microcontroller and integrating it with the different sensor technologies. The incorporation of the RFID was also a new technology for us.