A Device for Automatically Measuring and Supervising the Critical Care Patient’S Urine Output

Roemi Fernández,Francisco Palacios,Abraham Otero,Teodor Akinfiev

doi:10.3390/s100100934

Roemi Fernández, Francisco Palacios + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/s100100934

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Abstract

Critical care units are equipped with commercial monitoring devices capable of sensing patients’ physiological parameters and supervising the achievement of the established therapeutic goals. This avoids human errors in this task and considerably decreases the workload of the healthcare staff. However, at present there still is a very relevant physiological parameter that is measured and supervised manually by the critical care units’ healthcare staff: urine output. This paper presents a patent-pending device capable of automatically recording and supervising the urine output of a critical care patient. A high precision scale is used to measure the weight of a commercial urine meter. On the scale’s pan there is a support frame made up of Bosch profiles that isolates the scale from force transmission from the patient’s bed, and guarantees that the urine flows properly through the urine meter input tube. The scale’s readings are sent to a PC via Bluetooth where an application supervises the achievement of the therapeutic goals. The device is currently undergoing tests at a research unit associated with the University Hospital of Getafe in Spain.

Highlights

Current critical care units are equipped with modern and sophisticated commercial monitoring devices that are capable of sensing most of the patient’s physiological parameters
The overall result is a considerable reduction in the workload of the healthcare staff, since they do not need to continuously supervise the physiological parameters of each of the patients of the critical care unit
The device would have to be built with readily available components, to simplify the prototype construction. It would be compliant with all the laws that apply to commercial urine meters, so the device could be approved by a Hospital Ethics Committee for the purpose of conducting clinical studies in critical care patients

Summary

Introduction

Current critical care units are equipped with modern and sophisticated commercial monitoring devices that are capable of sensing most of the patient’s physiological parameters. Blood pressure, blood levels of oxygen saturation, respiratory rate, brain waves, and intracranial pressure are just a few examples. They provide physicians with an electronic recording of physiological parameters that can be inspected at any time. As with any repetitive and monotonous task, supervision of the temporal evolution of the patient’s physiological parameters is prone to errors [2, 4]. Many of these errors are avoided when such tasks are automated

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