Design, Fabrication, and Testing of an Internet Connected Intravenous Drip Monitoring Platform

In the era of increasing connectivity, everything including upcoming medical devices is being connected to the internet. These medical devices are monitoring units which measure application specific parameters, process them, perform data encoding and send them to a cloud server. Intravenous (IV) therapy is a common medical procedure which requires a continuous monitoring of the setup to avoid complications which can be achieved by running the system for hours. Traditionally, doctors and nurses use their experience to estimate the time required by an IV to run. But this whole process is cumbersome on their busy on-duty schedules and makes their work output less efficient. The current study proposes an internet connected monitoring platform for IV drips. The device consists of two main units, namely chamber unit and pole unit. Chamber unit houses two types of sensors, optical based for drop detection and capacitive based for level detection, both of which are placed on the chamber unit. The pole unit majorly consists of a microcontroller and a GSM-based communication module. The device was tested for parameters like accuracy, readout stability, change in fluid and ambient conditions, end chamber conditions, malfunction and cloud readouts.