Pressure Monitoring System in Gastro-Intestinal Tract

Abstract

Diseases in the gastro-intestinal tract are on an increasing trend. In order to diagnose a patient, various signals of the digestive organ, such as temperature, pH, and pressure, can offer the helpful information. Among the above mentioned signals, we choose the pressure variation as a monitoring signal. The variation of a pressure signal of the gastro-intestinal tract can offer the information of a digestive trouble or some clues of the diseases. In this paper, a pressure monitoring system for the digestive organs of a living pig is presented. This is why a pig’s gastro-intestinal tract is very similar as human’s. This system concept is to transmit the measured biomedical signals from a transmitter in a living pig to a wireless receiver that is positioned out of body. The integrated solution includes the following parts: (1) the swallow type pressure capsule, (2) the receiving set consisting of a receiver, decoder box, and PC. The merit of the proposed system is that the monitoring system can supply the precise and repeatable pressure in the gastro-intestinal tract. In addition, the design of low power consumption enables it to keep sending reliable signals while the pressure capsule is working in the digestive organ. The subject of the study for the pressure monitoring system is in-vivo experiments for a living pig. We achieved the pressure tracings in digestive organs and verified the validity of system after several in-vivo tests using the pressure monitoring system.