During the review process of the article, Dr. Akinfiev passed away. He was a member of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Russia. During his lifetime, he authored more than 250 publications including 80 patents and he participated in over 40 research projects. Teodor, your colleagues miss you. : 17 October 2010; in revised form: 20 November 2010 / Accepted: 23 November 2010 / Published: 2 December 2010 Abstract: In critical care units most of the patients' physiological parameters are sensed by commercial monitoring devices. These devices can also supervise whether the values of the parameters lie within a pre-established range set by the clinician. The automation of the sensing and supervision tasks has discharged the healthcare staff of a considerable workload and avoids human errors, which are common in repetitive and monotonous tasks. Urine output is very likely the most relevant physiological parameter that has yet to be sensed or supervised automatically. This paper presents a low cost patent-pending device capable of sensing and supervising urine output. The device uses reed switches activated by a magnetic float in order to measure the amount of urine collected in two containers which are arranged in cascade. When either of the containers fills, it is emptied automatically using a siphon mechanism and urine begins to collect again. An electronic unit sends the state of the reed Sensors 2010, 10 10715 switches via Bluetooth to a PC that calculates the urine output from this information and supervises the achievement of therapeutic goals. Received
The second device uses reed switches activated by a magnetic float to measure the amount of urine collected in two containers REF .
A Low Cost Device for Monitoring the Urine Output of Critical Care Patients
Sensors (Basel, Switzerland)
Sensors (Basel, Switzerland)
Engineering Medicine Computer Science