Diagnosis of Pressure Ulcer Stage Using On-Device AI

Pressure ulcers are serious healthcare concerns, especially for the elderly with reduced mobility. Severe pressure ulcers are accompanied by pain, degrading patients’ quality of life. Thus, speedy and accurate detection and classification of pressure ulcers are vital for timely treatment. The conventional visual examination method requires professional expertise for diagnosing pressure ulcer severity but it is difficult for the lay carer in domiciliary settings. In this study, we present a mobile healthcare platform incorporated with a light-weight deep learning model to exactly detect pressure ulcer regions and classify pressure ulcers into six severities such as stage 1–4, deep tissue pressure injury, and unstageable. YOLOv8 models were trained and tested using 2800 annotated pressure ulcer images. Among the five tested YOLOv8 models, the YOLOv8m model exhibited promising detection performance with overall classification accuracy of 84.6% and a mAP@50 value of 90.8%. The mobile application (app) was also developed applying the trained YOLOv8m model. The mobile app returned the diagnostic result within a short time (≒3 s). Accordingly, the proposed on-device AI app can contribute to early diagnosis and systematic management of pressure ulcers.