Monitoring of Diabetic Foot Syndrome Treatment: Some New Perspectives

Diabetic foot syndrome (DFS) is one of the major complications of diabetes, and it can lead to foot amputations. It is very important to assure good medical care for diabetic patients not only during their stay at hospital but also at home. Telecare can be one good solution for extending medical care to patients' homes. There are some reports regarding the application of new technologies in this field. The standard current model of telecare of DFS includes experts at hospital who conduct clinical examinations and decision making at a distance, in close cooperation with a visiting nurse and the patient. In the present paper a new paradigm of the DFS's telecare is introduced, which eliminates the visiting nurse. The designed and developed TeleDiaFoS system consists of a traditional database and mobile patient's module (PM) allowing for documentation of the foot images as well as the results of blood glucose and blood pressure measurements taken by the patient himself at home. A 2-year validation of the TeleDiaFoS system on 10 DFS patients (3 months each) proved its usefulness and led to acceptance of this type of technical support by patients and physicians. The designed and developed system and proposed sterilization procedure of the PM have been found to be easy to use by the patient at home.