Graduate Student Seminar Series – Niroja Balakumar

Graduate Student Seminar Series
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Location: MS2158 – 1 King’s College Circle
Presentation Title: Investigating In-Bed Repositioning for Pressure Injury Prevention
Abstract:
Regular repositioning is important for preventing pressure injuries (PIs). However, there
are indications that i) the current best practice for repositioning may not sufficiently
offload high-risk areas of the body and ii) there is a need for better tools for measuring
adherence to the 2-hour repositioning standard. The primary aims of this thesis were to 1)
evaluate the quality of offloading when current repositioning best practices were used 2)
evaluate the use of ankle-mounted IMUs to measure 2-hour repositioning schedules.
Twenty-three participants adopted 39 in-bed positions while wearing ankle IMUs and
force sensing resistors on key body locations. Repositioning at ±45° side-lying positions
was found to offload high risk areas of the body better than the ±30° side-lying best
practice. An XGBoost classifier trained using ankle IMU data achieved an F1 score of 95.2%
for posture-classification, demonstrating good potential for the IMU-based system.
Supervisor Name: Tilak Dutta
Year of Study: 2
Program of Study: MASc
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