An add-on solution to take measures automatically from critical care urine meters

Abstract

Critical care patients have most of their physiological parameters automatically sensed by sophisticated commercial monitoring devices. These devices can also supervise whether the values of each parameter lie within a preestablished normal range, and warn of deviations from this range by triggering audible alarms. Automation of the sensing and supervision of physiological parameters discharges the healthcare staff of a considerable workload. Furthermore, it avoids human errors, which are common in repetitive and monotonous tasks. However, there is still a very relevant physiological parameter that is sensed and supervised manually by the healthcare staff: urine output. In this paper we present a patent-pending addon solution that can be easily incorporated into commercial urine meters to transform these manual measuring devices into automated measuring devices. The solution is based on capacitive sensors capable of taking continuous measurements of the height of the column of liquid accumulated in the various chambers that make up a commercial urine meter. An electronic unit sends the measures of the capacitive sensors via Bluetooth to a PC which calculates the urine output from this information and supervises the achievement of therapeutic goals.