Smartphone-Based Wound Assessment System for Patients With Diabetes

Abstract-Diabetic foot ulcers represent a significant health issue. Currently, clinicians and nurses mainly base their wound assessment on visual examination of wound size and healing status, while the patients themselves seldom have an opportunity to play an active role. Hence, amore quantitative and cost-effective examination method that enables the patients and their caregivers to take a more active role in daily wound care potentially can accelerate wound healing, save travel cost and reduce healthcare expenses. Considering the prevalence of smartphones with a high-resolution digital camera, assessing wounds by analyzing images of chronic foot ulcers is an attractive option. In this paper, we propose a novel wound image analysis system implemented solely on the Android smartphone. The wound image is captured by the camera on the smartphone with the assistance of an image capture box. After that, the smartphone performs wound segmentation by applying the acceleratedmean-shift algorithm. Specifically, the outline of the foot is determined based on skin color, and the wound boundary is found using a simple connected region detection method.Within the wound boundary, the healing status is next assessed based on red–yellow–black color evaluation model.