A Simple and Low Cost Device for Automatically Supervising Urine Output of Critical Patients

Abstract

Nowadays, patients admitted to critical care units have most of their physiological parameters sensed by sophisticated commercial monitoring devices. These devices also supervise whether the values of the parameters lie within a preestablished range of normality set by the clinician. If any of the parameters leaves its normality range, an alarm will be triggered. The automation of the sensing and supervision of physiological parameters discharges the healthcare staff of a considerable workload. It also avoids human errors, which are common in repetitive and monotonous tasks.Urine output is a physiological parameter that, despite being of great relevance in the treatment of critical care patients, is still measured and supervised manually. This paper presents a device capable of sensing and supervising urine output automatically. The device uses reed switches that are activated by a magnet that is attached to a float in order to measure the amount of urine collected in two containers. An electronic unit sends the state of the reed switches to a PC, which supervises the achievement of therapeutic goals.