Understanding Pressure Mapping Technology for Better Wheelchair Seating
Where a patient’s body meets their wheelchair, you want them to experience nothing but safe pressure and support. All too often, however, that area of contact is riddled with sore spots and ongoing injury risk for the person bound to it.
Whether the patient needs a wheelchair only for a few weeks or months or will require it for the rest of their lives, it must be comfortable. The research is clear:
“People living with chronic pain are at heightened risk for mental health problems, including depression, anxiety, and substance use disorders. Chronic pain can affect sleep, increase stress levels and contribute to depression. An estimated 35% to 45% of people with chronic pain experience depression.”
Given those statistics, ensuring safety with the wheelchair seating surface in all sitting positions is necessary. Not only does this prevent pressure injury and skin breakdown, but it also just makes people happier.
How do we accomplish this, exactly?
That’s where mapping technology comes in.
The Evolution of Wheelchair Technology
Chair technology has improved in the last 400 years, especially after the invention of motorized versions. The ability to change angles and lift, move cushions, customize armrests, and other advancements have all increased the efficacy of today's designs.
However, despite the vast power of wheelchairs to change lives, they are not all created equal. A comfortable wheelchair is much preferred to an ill-fitting one for many reasons. An ill-fitting wheelchair can lead to trouble staying in the chair, pressure sores, and even more significant complications.
That's why, when it comes to comfort, a pressure mapping system wheelchair users can count on is vital.
Where Wheelchairs Get It Wrong
The main trouble with wheelchairs and wheelchair cushions today is that they aren't carefully tailored to the user. Every human is different, with unique dimensions and characteristics, including:
- Waist length
- Arm and leg length
- Neck and head tilt
- Back curvature
- Bony prominences
- Specific condition
- Skin Integrity
A comfortable and safe wheelchair must accommodate people according to their needs, which means one-size-fits-all is the wrong approach. To a certain extent, we can't blame wheelchair manufacturers for this: they can only modify chairs so much when making them en masse.
The trouble occurs when users get their chairs from clinics, and effort needs to be made toward customization and cushion selection. Luckily, that's a problem we can fix with a pressure mapping system wheelchair users can count on.
Why Is Pressure Distribution Important?
People may find themselves confined to wheelchairs for an extended period for many reasons. That could be due to spinal cord injury, another permanent condition, or simply while they heal from a broken leg.
Areas of high pressure against bony protuberances can create problems for wheelchair users. As problem areas intensify over time, they develop sore spots and broken skin, which leads to poorer patient outcomes. These include:
- Discomfort and inability to find a good position;
- Reduced blood flow to the area;
- Pressure sores, or areas that become inflamed and may even break open and suppurate;
- Inflamed pelvis bones, also called ischial tuberosities or sit bones; and
- Difficulty healing these areas due to the need to continue sitting in the wheelchair.
Any of these problems can make sitting time unpleasant or even unbearable for patients. To prevent this, it's important to alternate cushions where necessary to mitigate areas of higher pressure. More important, though, is to get the right fit between the patient and chair cushions in the first place.
To accomplish both of these, you need a means of obtaining accurate pressure readings, which means you must understand how pressure mapping for wheelchair seating works.
What Is Pressure Mapping?
Pressure mapping uses advanced technology to accomplish a simple goal: figuring out exactly how and where someone sits in a chair.
How does it work? You lay a mat embedded with thousands of sensors across the chair's base, back, and sides, ideally with its cushions already in place. The sensors send information to software, translating it into data and a 3D image of where the highest pressure levels occur.
Professionals can then adjust the exact placement and composition of cushions and other devices using the data, the image, or both. This will keep the wheelchair user much more comfortable over time, leading to many benefits.
Pressure Mapping for Wheelchairs
Wheelchair users often develop pressure injuries because high-pressure areas form between their bony prominences—typically their sit bones—and their seating surface. Many patients cannot identify where these pressure points occur or how intense they are, making prevention difficult. Pressure mapping technology addresses this challenge by using a network of sensors that measure contact pressure across the entire seating surface.
These sensors generate detailed pressure readings that create color-coded visualizations, with high-pressure areas displayed in red and orange, and low-pressure areas in green and blue. This precise visual feedback clearly identifies problem areas, allowing for targeted adjustments to the wheelchair and cushions.
By providing both visual representations and thousands of data points showing exactly where pressure concentrates, these mapping systems enable occupational therapists and medical professionals to make evidence-based seating modifications. Healthcare providers can then educate wheelchair users on optimal positioning techniques and movement strategies to redistribute pressure, significantly reducing discomfort and the risk of pressure injuries.
Benefits of Pressure Mapping for Wheelchairs
So, what benefits of a pressure mapping system can wheelchair users expect? Here are a few.
Greater Comfort & Safety
Even the fanciest chairs and cushions can pose problems for users. Sitting for hours—on an airplane flight or during a long movie—is uncomfortable and challenging. The same applies to someone whose disability keeps them bound in a chair for hours or days.
A pressure mapping system helps alleviate that discomfort by identifying where to place tailored padding suited to each individual's needs. The extra padding under the sit bones for those with a skinny rear end keeps them comfortable. For those with wider frames, adjustments to the side cushions ensure the user can sit comfortably without feeling restricted. Any tailoring will help—and the ability to tailor as needed can help even more.
Highly Tailored Adjustments
A pressure mapping system wheelchair seating clinicians and users trust for one-time customization is good. A system that helps them adjust their chair to address different issues is even better.
Sensor mats can do that, helping them identify issues with more than one way of sitting. Some wheelchair users alternate between leaning back and leaning forward, for instance. Others lean to either side to relieve pressure in different areas.
You can customize a chair for different positions with a pressure mapping sensor mat. That way, a person knows how to adjust for maximum comfort when in that position, which leads to much longer-term use potential.
Reduced Pressure Sores
Pressure sores are a severe issue for wheelchair users, and it's essential to avoid them. Again, that's where sensors come in, as they help pinpoint areas of high pressure that would otherwise rub against bony prominences, creating bruises, lesions, and ruptures.
Pressure sores that are left untreated pose a serious threat to the health of the wheelchair user, which is why it's critical to avoid them. You can do that with the correct pressure mapping system.
How Does the Pressure Mapping for Wheelchairs Work?
All right, you're sold on the power of pressure mapping to increase patient safety and comfort, and to minimize the burden of guesswork for occupational therapists, doctors, nurses, and other caregivers. But how exactly does such a system work, and how can you implement it at your clinic or care facility?
Here's the basic rundown:
Purchase a Wheelchair Pressure Mapping System
Wheelchair Pressure Mapping Systems like ForeSite® SS give you all the tools to take accurate pressure readings and put them into practice. You can build accurate pressure maps in minutes by combining sensor-based hardware with software that captures wireless data.
Take Pressure Readings
Lay the mat over the wheelchair cushion and measure the points of contact between the person and the actual chair they will use.
However, any readings can help determine whether exactly the bony protuberances are in your patient's body and correct them.
Use Data & Mapping for Complete Visualization
The software system will build a complete pressure map, showing exactly where pressure occurs in colour-coded imaging equivalent to that you'd see with a brain scan: areas of high activity (pressure) in warm colours and low activity (pressure) in blue.
This is especially useful because it allows the patient to chime in with their experience about where tissue breakdown occurs. Working with them, you can devise a wheelchair cushioning solution – that may or may not include flotation – to minimize their discomfort.
Adjust as Necessary
Sometimes a patient's situation changes. They may heal, for instance, meaning they are spending less time in the chair. Or they may have a degenerative condition that means they lose muscle mass and ability over time, creating different pressure areas.
Either way, you can take a new pressure reading and teach the patient to adjust accordingly. This greatly benefits both patient and caregiver, because the former remains safe while the latter has to do less guessing.
ForeSite SS: The Ultimate Wheelchair Pressure Imaging System for Therapists & Clinicians
The XSENSOR ForeSite® SS is the ultimate pressure imaging system for therapists and clinicians. Now you can help prevent pressure injuries in patients using wheelchairs without a bunch of recalibration and with the utmost confidence in your results. Provide pressure relief the first time, and continue providing it for your patients over the long haul.
Would you like to learn more about implementing a pressure mapping system that wheelchair users trust—and that makes them trust you more? You can say goodbye to inconsistent results with existing sensor systems because XSENSOR's ForeSite SS advanced hardware-software combo is here to help.
Our systems help you move beyond frustrations of the past: costly investments that don't pay themselves back, constant recalibrations, additional expensive testing needed, and quick obsolescence. The ForeSite SS Wheelchair Seating system is engineered to avoid these issues, giving you a long-lasting, reliably accurate, endlessly reusable system that requires very little recalibration. It would help if you used it repeatedly, leading to happier patients, a faster workflow, and better reviews for your practice.
Would you like to learn more about pressure mapping software here at XSENSOR? We invite you to get in touch with XSENSOR for a demo, to ask questions or to learn more about our systems today.
