AERO: An Objective Peripheral Edema Measurement Device

Peripheral edema is of ten assessed by medical prof essionals to gain insights about development of many patient conditions. Currently, doctors assess edema by pushing on the swollen area of a patient. The difficulty with this method is the inconsistency assessment results between different physicians due to the subjective nature of the practice. The proposed solution uses AERO (or Air Edema RepOrting), a mobile, handheld device consisting of a high-speed camera with a macro lens, LED light, and compressed air to create edema indentation and capture images of the skin /tissue response. A MATLAB program analyzes these images and determines the correct level of edema. AERO was tested with a LifeformOR pitting edema trainer (four pieces of skin sample that represent the four edema levels). Various system configurations, such as the air pressure, camera to sample distance, and air incidence angle, were examined and optimal parameters were identified. Results demonstrated that AERO was able to distinguish the four levels of edema sample pads. This solution can potentially provide a quantified, standard evaluation of peripheral edema for both home and health care environments.