From expensive to simple solutions: new projects rethink wound care

June 11, 2026

Two innovation projects that have received IDEA funding address different challenges in wound care. The projects share common goals: to improve healing, reduce complications and make treatment more effective.

One project focuses on preventing complications in wounds after surgery, while the other is working to make wound care less invasive and gentler using AI. Both projects have the potential to create a positive impact for both patients and the healthcare system.

New solution to help surgical patients
After various types of surgery, such as women who have had a caesarean section or patients who have had excess skin removed after significant weight loss, there can be challenges when it comes to wound healing.

Even minor wound issues can lead to long and resource-intensive post-operative care. This means more visits to the clinic, increased need for wound care and a longer course of illness for the patient.

Clinician and researcher David Hebbelstrup Jensen is leading a project working to improve negative pressure dressings, a type of dressing that can create and maintain a stable vacuum over closed surgical wounds.

Currently, the vacuum in the dressing is maintained by an electrical pumping system, but this is an expensive and impractical solution as it is noisy and difficult to keep the patient comfortable.

- It is well documented, for example, that in patients who have a caesarean section, this type of dressing appoints a lower risk of wound complications. The same trend can be seen for many other types of surgical patients, explains David Hebbelstrup Jensen from the Department of Plastic Surgery at Odense University Hospital.

The project is working to create negative pressure in a different way. David Hebbelstrup Jensen and his collaborators will create a prototype that is both simpler and cheaper - while maintaining the effect.

This will enable healthcare professionals to better support the patient's healing and reduce the risk of wounds bursting open. The ambition is to create a dressing that can hold a vacuum for up to five to seven days.

The tissue in a wound is constantly changing during the healing process. Using technology and AI, healthcare professionals can monitor the condition of the wound continuously - without disturbing the healing process.

                              Professor Daniel Teichmann

AI can help assess wound healing

While the first project works to prevent complications, the second addresses another challenge in day-to-day wound care: that healthcare professionals today need to remove the dressing to assess the wound.

The deeper a wound is, the higher the risk that it will not heal properly. Today, removing the dressing itself can delay the healing process and increase the risk of infection.

Researcher and Professor Daniel Teichmann wants to solve this problem with a new type of artificial intelligent wound dressing that uses different techniques to measure electrical characteristics in the tissue. AI can analyse what stage the wound is in and how deep it is.

- The tissue in a wound is constantly changing during the healing process. Using technology and AI, healthcare professionals can monitor the condition of the wound continuously - without disturbing the healing process. The advantage is also that this monitoring solution does not harm the patient when applied continuously, as e.g. X-rays would do, explains Professor Daniel Teichmann from the Maersk Mc-Kinney Moller Institute at the University of Southern Denmark.

The AI solution makes it possible to detect signs of complications such as inflammation or infection earlier. This means that treatment of complications in wounds can be started earlier and more precisely - and longer hospitalisation can be avoided.

MedTech Odense's funding is a steppingstone - with this initial funding, the project will build its own device to perform the wound check and show proof of concept in the lab. But in the long term, the ambition is to test the method on animals and humans and eventually use it in healthcare.

Two paths to the same goal
Although the two projects are working to facilitate different parts of wound care, they point in the same direction: they are working on solutions that both improve the patient’s experience and reduce the risk of infection and longer hospitalisations.

What the projects have in common is that they are still in the early stages of developing and testing prototypes. But this phase is crucial for taking new ideas from concept to practice.