Hypervolemia screening in predialysis healthcare for hemodialysis patients using fuzzy color reason analysis

• Main Authors: Wei-Ling Chen, Chung-Dann Kan, Chia-Hung Lin, Ying-Shin Chen, Yi-Chen Mai
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: SAGE Publishing 2017-01-01
• Series: International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1177/1550147716685090

Maintaining adequate dry weight and fluid volume balance is an important issue for dialysis patients. Malnutrition and sodium intake are the primary factors that cause fluid volume imbalance and changes in body weights. Inadequate dry weight control results in higher levels of blood pressures and is related to various complications, such as volume overload, hypertension, congestive symptoms, and cardiovascular diseases. Moreover, inadequate fluid removal provokes hypotension during dialysis treatment. Thus, we propose an early warning tool based on fuzzy color reason analysis in predialysis healthcare for hypervolemia screening. The anthropometric method is a rapid, non-invasive, and simple technique for estimating the total body water. In this study, Watson standard formula is employed to estimate cross-sectional standard of total body water with the patient characteristics, including gender, age, height, and weight. In contrast to the experienced anthropometric formulas, Watson formula has less than 2% of margin errors and provides a criterion as a reference manner to estimate the total body water in patient’s normal dry weight. In addition, inadequate dry weight and total body water controls will lead to higher blood pressures. The systolic blood pressure is also an indicator to evaluate pre-hypertension of 120–139 mmHg and hypertension of greater than or equal to 140 mmHg. Therefore, the levels of two indicators, total body water and systolic blood pressure, are parameterized with fuzzy membership grades to describe the normal and the specific ranges of undervolemia and hypervolemia. A color reason analysis utilizes a hue–saturation–value color model to design a color perceptual manner for separating normal condition from hypervolemia or undervolemia. Normalized hue angle and saturation value provide a promising visual representation with color codes to realize the patients’ diagnosis. Dialysis patients with hypertension demonstrated that the proposed model can be used in clinical applications. In addition, a healthcare chair is carried out to measure blood pressure and weight in predialysis. The proposed assistant tool integrates an electronic pressure monitor and an electronic weight monitor, and fuzzy color reason analysis is also intended to be established in an intelligent vehicle via a WiFi wireless local area network for cloud computing.