Design of a customizable and portable pneumatic compression device

Abstract

Pneumatic compression systems have been becoming the favorable compression method for treating venous stasis, or chronic venous efficiency (CVI), for the last 20 years. However, a standard routine for different venous stasis’s complications is still missing due to lack of clinical evidences, while many commercial devices only offer fixed treatment routine. In this paper, a design of a customizable pneumatic compression device is proposed. The purpose is to provide both common routines currently used in clinical therapeutics and a fine degree of customization between routines to serve clinicians in search of more clinical evidences to optimize the treatment. The proposed system is also made to be portable for home treatment with an easy but adequate user interaction. The resulted outcome was a customizable 4-chambered device that is able to offer 3 common treatment routines and 3 adjustable options of (1) amount of pressure in each chamber, (2) selecting chamber to be air pumped for compression and (3) the compression time. Compared with one of the most upto-date commercial devices, the proposed system is capable to perform equally in terms of functions while costing much less. The proposed system is planned to be tested at National Geriatric hospital, Hanoi, Vietnam in the near future.