In 2010, UCLA nursing professor Barbara Bates-Jensen traveled to Haiti to direct and provide wound care for victims of a 7.0-magnitude earthquake that had killed or injured more than half a million people and left 5 million displaced.
“They’d been laying on army cots, many for three weeks before I got there, and in addition to the wounds they suffered from the earthquake, they had pressure injuries down to the bone,” Bates-Jensen recalled.
There couldn’t have been anyone better suited for the crisis. A world-renowned researcher and author on wound-care best practices, Bates-Jensen is an expert on such pressure ulcers—commonly known as bedsores—which largely affect immobile people like critically ill hospital patients, those with spinal cord injuries and nursing home residents.
What is the medical impact of bedsores?
In the U.S. alone, 2.5 million people get bedsores each year, and some 60,000 die from bedsore-related complications. The American health care system spends up to $11.6 billion annually to treat these pressure ulcers. And even more staggering: They are 95% preventable.
Nurses traditionally identify bedsores by looking for skin discoloration. But by the time the redness is observed, the damage is done. The data also show that individuals with darker skin tones, including Black and Latino patients, have a higher prevalence of severe pressure ulcers because the discoloration is more difficult to see.
“This health disparity was driving me crazy,” Bates-Jensen said. “We were relying on such a subjective method, visually observing for skin color changes, which missed a whole segment of patients.”
How the SEM scanner revolutionized wound care—and made health care more equitable
In concert with a UCLA computer scientist and a UCLA engineer, Bates-Jensen invented the SEM Scanner, the first handheld wireless wound-assessment device, which was licensed by UCLA’s Technology Development Group to Bruin Biometrics. It was a game changer.
The scanner measures moisture, or edema, beneath the skin, which is a biophysical marker of early tissue damage, and it can detect early-stage pressure injuries up to 10 days before damage is visible.
“The best part is the device doesn’t care what color the skin is, because it’s not looking at the skin—it’s reading within the tissues,” Bates-Jensen said of the scanner, which operates similarly to the seismometers used on NASA’s Mars landing craft that looks for clues beneath the planet’s surface. “And so just by virtue of that, you’re creating a more equitable situation where you can pick up the damage on everyone.”
Today, the SEM Scanner is in use in hospitals in Europe, the U.K., Canada and America—in the U.S., it’s estimated that it’s has been used on more than 1 million patients and prevented 50,000 pressure injuries.
Now, Bates-Jensen, who is also associate dean of academic affairs at the UCLA Joe C. Wen School of Nursing, is involved in a study that could make the device available outside the clinical setting—in nursing homes, whose vulnerable residents are at high risk of bed sores.
“We think this study will also tell us a lot about how we can best implement technology in this type of health care setting,” she said, “as well as adding to the growing data looking at skin tones and how that may impact the delivery of care.”
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