Mobile phone imaging for remote monitoring of surgical wounds
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Feasibility assessment of out-of-hospital remote surveillance of surgical wound sites using a mobile phone image capture approach
IRAS ID
241927
Contact name
Mark Field
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
The Walton Centre NHS Foundation Trust
Clinicaltrials.gov Identifier
Duration of Study in the UK
1 years, 0 months, 0 days
Research summary
About 5 in 100 patients develop surgical site infections (SSI) after hospital discharge. A surgical wound infection can develop at any time after surgery until the wound has healed. Very occasionally, an infection can occur several months after an operation. During the patient’s stay in hospital, nurses routinely change their wound dressings to check for any signs of infection. However, since infections develop after patients leave hospital it is difficult for staff to monitor signs of infection in patients’ homes.
The recent improvement in surgical operations means that more patients are discharged from hospital earlier than they would have been in the past even before their wounds are healed. Increasingly, there is a higher risk for patients to develop SSI after leaving hospital. There is therefore a need for a simple but reliable method for monitoring patients after hospital discharge to ensure that there is timely support in the event that there are wound complications.
In this study, participating patients will be trained to fit a lighting chamber onto their mobile phone camera to take images of their wounds after hospital discharge. They will be set up with a secure encrypted email account and shown how to email their images to a hospital computer. The researchers will manually analyse the images at the end of the study. The investigators will explore patients experience in terms of ease of use and acceptability. Opinions will also be sought from health care professionals and other stakeholders through completion of a questionnaire or interviews. A total of 40 patients will be invited to take part in the study over a period of 12 months.REC name
North West - Liverpool Central Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
18/NW/0519
Date of REC Opinion
31 Aug 2018
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion