Table 1.
Design needs, requirements, and the corresponding restrictions.
| Follow-up of the Monitoring and Assessment Stages within the Pressure Ulcers (PU) Treatment Process | ||
|---|---|---|
| Design needs for the artifact | Technical requirements | Restrictions associated to the environment |
| It must include a device to register information about the patient’s health status, regardless of her location | Mobile device with wireless data connectivity, screen, camera, keyboard and data templates | Mobile data service available at the patient’s location |
| It must have the ability to capture images of the wounds | ||
| It must have the ability to transmit the information collected, as well as to receive information and upload it to the information system | ||
| It must have the ability to manage the information about all the visits of the healthcare team to the patient, recorded on a historian | Graphical user interface | Visibility and resolution conditions of the graphic elements |
| It must have the ability to detect if the wounds under control increase or decrease its size in the period between visits | Image processing and subsequent calculations derived from said processing | Image control and quality |
| It must provide a metric corresponding to the global patient’s status, associated to the evaluation of the medical treatment | Braden, or similar, scale | Homogeneity in the assessment of the scale score by different healthcare professionals |
| It must make available all the information stored in the system, as well as any other coming from the treatments applied to the patient after the healthcare team | Computer equipment and software application with healthcare templates | IT support |
| It must combine the expert evaluations with the rest of the process information in the system | Expert systems that combine data coming from devices and data from healthcare assessment | |
| It must allow the processing of the information collected by the devices together with the evaluations of the expert establishing, based on them, recommendations regarding the treatment that the patient is currently undergoing | ||