Lord of the Rings technology is being used in New Zealand hospitals and wound-care clinics to track the progress of healing.

New Zealand company ARANZ Medical Limited said yesterday it has designed SilhouetteMobile, equipment using digital photography originally developed to help create the digital creatures in the Rings movies.

The company claimed the innovation, a world first, provided accurate and detailed monitoring of wound healing.

Health care professionals no longer had to rely on inexact methods for assessing the healing progress of ulcers and other skin wounds.

Easy to use and inexpensive, the small battery-powered device photographs skin wounds, calculates the wound area and depth, and stores the information on the palm-top computer.

The resulting data tracks the healing progress of individual wounds.