Student and Team of Professionals Develop Cutting-Edge Wound Care App
When Sreehita Hajeebu ’23 proposed her Capstone Project during her junior year, supervising faculty quickly realized that the scale and timeline of the project far exceeded a typical MFS Capstone Project. She had been reading about and watching videos of doctors speaking about disparities in wound care and felt that it was an area that she could conduct research and possibly make a difference.
Within weeks, Sreehita was working independently to study how the use of technology and artificial intelligence could help address disparities with wound care treatment. “Rural and low-income areas often do not have the access to high-quality health care that highly populated areas do,” said Sreehita. “During the pandemic, virtual health care has become much more prevalent and people have become more comfortable using technology. Technology connects us globally.”
Sreehita was eager to use her technology knowledge and skills to address these disparities and a lack of standardization with wound care. It became her goal to create a mechanism for people to assess wounds using technology, specifically the cameras on their smartphones and tablets.
Working with her father, who is an information technology professional, Sreehita was able to assemble a team that has grown to include eight professionals – doctors, technology experts, and health care business professionals.
Sreehita and her colleagues have developed an app that is now in the prototype phase that uses artificial intelligence and augmented reality to help assess wounds. “Artificial intelligence and augmented reality is the future, said Sreehita. “Our app will only become smarter, more precise, and accurate with time. With still images and videos taken from smartphones, our team is developing this app to be able to list recommended care, healing trends, wound measurements and more based on these images.”
The team has met weekly or more frequently for more than a year as they’ve developed the app and a business plan. They currently are in an intense data-gathering phase, seeking out data from podiatrists and other physicians who deal with wound care frequently.
They recently unveiled the app at the Symposium on Advanced Wound Care in Annapolis, MD in April, and will soon file for a provisional patent.
“It has been quite fascinating to keep coming up with new ideas to break the limits of what society has known to be true in the field of telehealth,” reflected Sreehita. “Seeing what technology can do is truly mind-blowing.”