More on Technology Advances in Wound Care

I am David Armstrong. I'm professor of surgery at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California, and it's a pleasure to be helping to co-chair with one of my close friends, Professor Najafi from Baylor University, this new technology, new novel systems to help us measure what we manage.

One of the big issues here with looking after these wounds is that it's often really difficult to measure what we manage. Much of what we do in wound healing, unfortunately, has been based on anecdote or based on our initial assessment of the wound. Some of those perceptions are correct, especially for an experienced clinician, but some of them aren't. And what we are really excited about now is that there are new current gen and next generation technologies that we think are going to be helpful in identifying and saying, if this then this.

What we now have as part of our new National Science Foundation funded Center to Stream Healthcare in Place are technologies that can help us assess wounds and overall bacterial quality in the wound very, very rapidly, and help us then have a debridement that is based on objective visual signs that we can then quantify through new novel technologies. We have new novel and smart skin technologies that are helping us identify tissue analytics in the wound that could then help us deliver something once we have sensed that that is needed in a wound, and maybe help us time better applications of therapies and therapeutics.

There are new data, believe it or not, on electrical stimulation in tissue repair and wound healing. You're going to hear one of the people in our session talking about that. In addition to that, we have the latest generation in wearables that are helping us to very, very specifically identify activity monitoring and gait and using a patient's activity and dosing that activity just as we might dose a drug. So it's a really exciting time to be working in this area, not only for people that are healing these wounds, but for people who are in remission from these wounds to maximize their ulcer free days.