Intravenous Infusion Monitoring Sensor Based on Longitudinal Electric Field Proximity Sensing Technique

Abstract

A novel intravenous (IV) infusion monitoring sensor is presented to measure the drop rate in the drip chamber of an IV infusion set. It is based on a capacitive proximity sensor and detects the variation of the longitudinal electric field induced by the drop falling into the drip chamber. Unlike the conventional capacitor sensor with two semi-cylindrical conductor plates, the proximity sensor for IV monitoring is composed of a pair of conductor rings which are mounted on the outer surface of the drip chamber with a specific gap between them. The characteristics of the proximity sensor for IV monitoring were investigated through three dimensional electrostatic simulations. It showed quite superior performances in comparison with the conventional capacitor sensor. Especially, the proposed proximity sensor exhibits consistent sensitivity regardless of its mounting position on the drip chamber, operates normally though the drip chamber is tilted and shows robustness to the changes of the drop size and the drip factor of the IV infusion set. Thus, the proximity sensor for IV monitoring is more suitable for use in actual environment of IV therapy compared with the conventional capacitor sensor. Received: Feb. 10, 2017, Revised: Mar. 20, 2017, Accepted: Mar. 21, 2017 This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License(http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/bync/3.0) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.