Automatic Medical Fluid Infusion System using LabVIEW for Student Design Competition 2013

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Contact Information

University: RV College of Engineering, Bangalore

Team Members (with year of graduation): (1) Karthik Reddy B M , (2) Mallikarjuna M , (3) Pavan K, (4) Vinod S

Faculty Advisers: Ms. Deepashri Devaraj

Email Address: reddy.karthik069@gmail.com

Submission Language: English

Project Information

Title: Automatic Medical Fluid Infusion System Using LabVIEW

Description:

Project Vision:

India is the second most populated country in the world. About 75% of health infrastructure, medical man power and other health resources are concentrated in urban areas where 27% of the populations live. Contagious, infectious and waterborne diseases dominate the morbidity pattern, especially in rural areas. The health status of Indians, is still a cause for grave concern, especially that of the rural population. To improve the prevailing situation, the problem of healthcare is to be addressed both at macro (national and state) and micro (district and rural) levels.

         The India, the backwardness of the healthcare sector is largely due to lack of medical personnel. The need is to establish much more achievable and a simple health system which can ensure good healthcare being made available to all. In 2001 India received $1,705 million as aid for the healthcare programs which were only 2% of the total healthcare expenditure by backwardness of healthcare system in the government.

The proposed patient monitoring system is reliable and cost effective. The simple design of our system makes it implementable on a very large scale: in rural areas wherein there are issues like medical staff shortage and also lack of proper patient monitoring systems and in hospitals in urban and semi-urban regions wherein expenditure on healthcare infrastructure can drastically cut down. Added to this, the maintenance cost of system is very minimal. The system also incorporates a fluid infusion pump system and an automated patient database.

Products

Software Tools:

NI LabVIEW 2011 Toolkits which include Programming, Measurement I/O, Mathematics, Signal Processing and Express

Hardware Tools:

• NI PXI 6220 (USB DAQ 9219, 6009) serving the purpose of data acquisition and stepper motor control
• LM 35 sensor for temperature measurement
• Plethysmographic method of measuring pulse rate ( combination of LED and LDR )
• Syringe pump setup

The Challenge

Commercially available patient monitoring systems have the limitation with respect to number of patient’s physiological parameters that can be measured. Most of these systems can measure only couple of parameters. More sophisticated systems measure several parameters. Hence the cost associated with such systems would be very high.

         For intensive care, more than one infusion pump is often required where drug dosage, concentration, interaction and fluid volume require separate infusion rates. The use of infusion pumps has been advocated over manual flow control system on the basis of assuring precise and accurate delivery of prescribed fluid volumes over a specified time and to help in better nursing management.

         Traditional methods of maintaining patient records are manual patient data entry. This is prone to be erroneous and is most likely to affect the the right type of medication being provided to the patient.

The Solution

Implementation:

The primary function of this system is to monitor the temperature, pulse rate of the patient using National Instrument’s LabVIEW and PXI. This project can be used to assist medical personnel by infusing the right amount of medical fluid depending on the patients various physiological parameters thus preventing risk to the patient’s life.

A PXI is a rugged PC-based platform that offers high-performance. PXI controller is an effective method of implementing high-volume and cost-sensitive applications that require reliable and deterministic real-time processing. These systems serve applications such as manufacturing test, military and aerospace, machine monitoring, automotive, and industrial test.  The proposed system makes use of NI PXI 6220.

A PXI 6220 has 16 analog input and 24 digital I/O channels. The circuitry associated with each of the physical parameter has been designed in such a way that an analog signal is obtained which is then fed to the analog input terminal of the PXI chassi. Further digital I/O lines are used to control the working of the stepper motor which forms a part of syringe pump system.

With the availability of several analog input and digital output channels in PXI 6220, monitoring upto 5-6 patients is possible with the proposed system. This is the stand out feature of the system when compared to commercial available systems, which are available as single system for a single patient.

Depending on the values of patient’s parameters, the medical personnel can set the amount of fluid to be infused in terms of milliliters per hour with the help of keypad provided on the user interface. This drives the syringe pump that utilizes a lead screw to infuse the required amount of fluid. This lead screw arrangement is used to convert the rotational motion of the stepper motor to linear motion. This linear motion pushes the syringe so as to infuse a particular amount of fluid. For safety purpose, login information is required to access the interface. Also a provision of patient report generation and database with patient's information is provided, so as to make the system more user-friendly.

Estimated Timeframes:

The proposed system was part of our academic project. We had implemented the system using PXI 6220 and USB DAQ’s such as 9219, 6009. The entire project (software and hardware) was completed within a span of two months. We demonstrated the operation of the system with couple of our friends and professors as patients.

Others

Video Link:

http://youtu.be/xbaFAopost8