Intravenous Infusion Monitoring and Flow Control System Equipped with Automatic Air Bubble Detection

In clinical care, intravenous infusion is one of the best ways for continuous drug delivery or clinical therapy. In most medical institutions, the workload of nurses and patient care increases due to fluctuating populations. This causes an increase in the work intensity of medical personnel. If the infusion is not monitored properly, it will lead to a medical accident. The problem is also affected due to the lack of economical and automatic infusion monitoring devices. In this case, it is proposed to design an automatic infusion control instrumentation that can detect the presence of air bubbles in the infusion to prevent air bubbles from entering the body and detect the rate of infusion flow. The proposed device is equipped with Thin Film Transistor technology (TFT) which functions to display and enter information about the condition of the intravenous infusion and a buzzer as a reminder alarm when an undesirable condition occurs. System accuracy and precision are verified for all flow rates. The results of the drops per minute test show accuracy with an error percentage of less than 2% within 1 minute. The device can detect the presence of air bubbles at high speed for response times below 20 ms and reduce the possibility of air bubbles escaping in the infusion hose according to the system test results that have been carried out. In the evaluation using target 20 drops per minute the infusion flow rate changes stably according to the angular movement of the servo motor. So it is hoped that the proposed system can help officers to monitor the condition of infusion and reduce the work intensity of medical workers.