**An mHealth Technology for Chronic Wound Management**

Marcia R. Friesen, Bennet Gigliotti and Tik Wai (Kiral) Poon

Additional information is available at the end of the chapter

http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/64010

#### **Abstract**

Increasingly, mobile consumer electronic devices are able to make meaningful applications in healthcare, and this chapter discusses the development of a mHealth app called SmartWoundCare, designed to document and assess chronic wounds on smartphones and tablets. Pressure ulcers (bedsores) were selected as the application area for SmartWoundCare due to their pervasiveness in healthcare and their associat‐ ed impacts on patients' quality of life and mortality, and electronic documentation is considered as an important intervention in pressure ulcer prevention and treatment. The chapter reviews the design of SmartWoundCare on Android and iOS platforms. Its benefits over paper‐based charting include automatically generated wound histories in graph and text formats, alerts and notifications for user‐set conditions, wound image galleries, and positioning for telehealth consultation by transmitting wound data across sites. The mobile app was implemented in a user trial in a long‐term care facility in Winnipeg, Canada, and the user trial illuminated that a key benefit of SmartWound‐ Care was the ability to take wound photographs. This feature had benefits for patients as well as caregivers. Consequently, algorithms were developed to analyse wound images for size and colour to provide additional indicators of wound progression.

**Keywords:** wound care, pressure ulcers, wound management, mHealth, mobile app
