Title
An automatic critical care urine meter.
Abstract
Nowadays patients admitted to critical care units have most of their physiological parameters measured automatically by sophisticated commercial monitoring devices. More often than not, these devices supervise whether the values of the parameters they measure lie within a pre-established range, and issue warning of deviations from this range by triggering alarms. The automation of measuring and supervising tasks not only discharges the healthcare staff of a considerable workload but also avoids human errors in these repetitive and monotonous tasks. Arguably, the most relevant physiological parameter that is still measured and supervised manually by critical care unit staff is urine output (UO). In this paper we present a patent-pending device that provides continuous and accurate measurements of patient's UO. The device uses capacitive sensors to take continuous measurements of the height of the column of liquid accumulated in two chambers that make up a plastic container. The first chamber, where the urine inputs, has a small volume. Once it has been filled it overflows into a second bigger chamber. The first chamber provides accurate UO measures of patients whose UO has to be closely supervised, while the second one avoids the need for frequent interventions by the nursing staff to empty the container.
Year
DOI
Venue
2012
10.3390/s121013109
SENSORS
Keywords
Field
DocType
biosensors,urine output,critical care,capacitive sensors,patient monitoring
CRITICAL CARE UNIT,Urine Specimen Collection,Remote patient monitoring,Workload,Electronic engineering,Capacitive sensing,Real-time computing,Automation,Metre (music),Engineering,Embedded system
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
12
10
1424-8220
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
3
1.01
5
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Abraham Otero1273.89
Roemi Fernández2488.93
Andrey Apalkov372.80
Manuel Armada4344.79