Aplicativo para smartphone para medição da área de feridas demarcadas em folhas transparentes

Abstract

Hyperglycemia in people with diabetes causes deficiencies in the healing process of the skin. Those deficiencies in the healing process may cause severe wounds, which demands specific treatments, requiring constant monitoring of the wound area progression. A very widespread and effective method for measuring the wound area is placing a transparent film over the wound and tracing the wound contour on the sheet. Next, the wound area is measured (calculated). However, it is possible to state that the manual calculation does not provide the exact value of the area of the wound since the contours tend to be irregular. This work presents the development and evaluation of a smartphone application, which calculates the wound area with minor errors when compared to the manual calculation. The user captures the image of the film containing the wound contour using the smartphone camera and a semi-automatic segmentation algorithm of this contour performs the area calculation. For the tests, contours of known areas were created and the mean relative errors obtained in the calculation of these areas were between 0.8 and 3.4 %. These results are comparable to those reported in similar studies, which proves that the solution developed in this work is reliable and can assist health professionals in the task of monitoring changes in wound areas during treatment.