Using Inertial Measurement Units and Machine Learning to Classify Body Positions of Adults in a Hospital Bed

In hospitals, timely interventions can prevent avoidable clinical deterioration. Early recognition of deterioration is vital to stopping further decline. Measuring the way patients position themselves in bed and change their positions may signal when further assessment is necessary. While inertial measurement units (IMUs) have been used in health research, their use inside hospitals has been limited. This study explores the use of IMUs with machine learning to continuously capture, classify and visualise patient positions in hospital beds. The participants attended a data collection session in a simulated hospital bedspace and were asked to adopt nine positions. Movement data were captured using five IMU Xsens DOTs attached to the forehead, wrists and ankles. Support Vector Machine (SVM) and K-Nearest Neighbours classifiers were trained using five different combinations of sensors (e.g., right wrist only, right and left wrist) to determine body positions. Data from 30 participants were analysed. The highest accuracy (87.7%) was achieved by SVM using forehead and wrist sensors. Adding data from ankle sensors reduced the accuracy. To preserve patient privacy in a hospital setting, a 3D visualisation was developed in Unity, offering a non-identifiable representation of patient positions. This system could help clinicians monitor changes in position which may signal clinical deterioration.