Towards a Practical Approach for Assessing Pressure Relief Activities for Manual Wheelchair Users in Their Daily Lives

摘要

Wheelchair users are at great risk of pressure ulcers, which are costly to treat and can seriously affect an individual's quality of life. To reduce the risk of pressure ulcers, Clinical Practice Guidelines (CPGs) recommend that manual wheelchair users perform repositioning activities, i.e., vertical pushups, lateral and forward leans, every 15 to 30 min. Despite the effectiveness of such pressure relief activities, the incidences of pressure ulcers among manual wheelchair users do not decline. Researchers hypothesize that poor compliance with CPGs could be the reason. However, no widely adopted applications are available to quantitatively evaluate whether a manual wheelchair user follows CPGs in their daily life. To fill in the gap, we have developed an iOS app that can communicate with an Apple Watch to collect the activity data of a manual wheelchair user. Based on the characteristics of sensor data specific to the iOS platform, we have developed a threshold-based algorithm to facilitate training data preparation and a neural-network-based approach to classify sensor data. Experimental results showed that our approach achieved a high classification accuracy. The outcome of this preliminary study lays a foundation for a nonintrusive and easy-to-use tool to assess a manual wheelchair user's daily pressure relief activity.