Pressure mapping bandage prototype: development and testing

Medical compression bandages (MCBs)are widely used in the treatment of chronic venous ulcers. They should be applied with a pressure gradient reducing from the ankle to the knee. Users of current medical compression bandages are dependent on their visual inspection of bandages in situ for the amount of extension and overlap in the MCBs to control the amount of pressure they apply to their patient leg. This lack of control of therapeutic dose is unacceptable neither form the clinical perspective nor the scientific one. A possible solution for the lack of control of pressures applied by MCBs may lie in integrating flexible pressure transducers like FlexiForce® sensors with MCBs. This paper presents the development of a pressure-mapping bandage prototype to map the pressure applied by compression products at multiple points, and reports on the preliminary experimental validation for this prototype using a pressure-mapping mannequin leg embedded with force sensors. The pressure-mapping bandage was found to report pressures, which agreed with the pressures measured using pressure-mapping mannequin leg in 27% of the cases and was able to describe the same pressure profile like the pressure-mapping mannequin leg in 57%. Results suggest that the pressure-mapping bandage might be suitable to provide clinicians with feedback about the quality of their bandaging in terms of pressure gradient and approximate pressure values.