Monitoring DVT cuffs for long-term operation: A fuzzy approach

Abstract

Stroke patients, as well as all those patients who are bed-bound for a long period of time are highly susceptible to deep vein thrombosis (DVT) as secondary complexity. DVT poses more dangers of a loose blood clot obstructing the blood flow to cardiac or cranial flow circuits and can cause further stroke or heart attack. As a typical clinical practice, a simple device called DVT Cuff is used on the leg which regulates the pressure using an air-pressure pump. This aids in blood circulation in extremities where most DVT happen. In this paper, A Fuzzy Inference System (FIS) has been proposed that can be used in long-term monitoring of the performance of the cuffs using human experience mapped into the logic hardware. Such monitoring applications are usually quite complicated and need large programs that might not fit into the small and limited memory of the embedded device. The proposed FIS converts heuristic knowledge of the healthcare experts, in solving this problem, into a hardware friendly matrix that has the possible input and output stored in it. A number of Flex sensors are the main sensing units that were used to detect the changes in the curvature of the surface of the DVT cuff, which accordingly provides the information related to the functionality of the cuff, i.e., if the cuff is inflated of deflated, etc...