Development of a uroflowmeter

• Main Author: Teh, Zhen Ping.
• Other Authors: Phee Soo Jay, Louis
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2013
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Mechanical engineering
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/55076
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Benign prostatic hyperplasia(BPH) is a voiding dysfunction that affects more than half of men by the age of 50. The uroflowmetry test provides quantitative information such as the flow rate, the total volume of urine expelled by the body and the voiding time of the urine. The majority of existing clinical uroflowmeters which are found in specialist clinics are expensive and require an operator in the clinic to serve the patient which makes it difficult for patients who want to receive testing at home. Thus, the goal of this final year project is to develop an affordable and user friendly uroflowmeter to increase productivity of the clinic and provide valuable medical information on the condition of the patient at home. The uroflowmeter in this project consist of a balance, transceiver, receiver and a printer. The Mettler Toledo balance obtains the weight of the urine and sends it every second via a RS232 cable to the transceiver. The Basic Stamp 2 microcontroller inside the transceiver then converts the weight of the urine into the flow rate of the urine by deducting the weight of the urine obtained in the first second from the weight of the urine obtained in the next second. Next, the flow rate of the urine is sent every second wirelessly from the Xbee Series 1 wireless module inside the transceiver to the Xbee Series 1 wireless module inside the receiver. The Basic Stamp 2 microcontroller inside the receiver then sends the flow rate of the urine every second serially to the USB computer port to the Graphical User Interface(GUI) in the computer. The GUI is used so that the doctors or nurses could easily manipulate the data to diagnose the patient. It displays the urine flow rate against time graph, show uroflowmetry values such as average urine flow rate, maximum urine flow rate, voiding time and so on. There is a function for the user to print a hardcopy of the uroflowmetry graph and uroflowmetry values. The uroflowmetry graph and the uroflowmetry values could be saved as well to the database for future references. The Basic Stamp 2 microcontroller is used in the project as it has more literature online and it has a well written manual to refer to compared to other microcontrollers. This Basic Stamp 2 microcontroller is mounted on the Board of Education carrier board provided by Parallax. This carrier board contains all the necessary hardware such as a breadboard area, barrel jack, I/O pin access header and so on. The requirements were programmed into the Basic Stamp 2 microcontroller in the transceiver and receiver by using the PBasic language. The Xbee Series 1 wireless module is provided by Digi International. The GUI was developed by using Microsoft Visual Basic.NET(Microsoft Visual Basic 2010). The database used in this project was Microsoft Access 2007. The final prototype was tested and a satisfactory experimental run was conducted with Dr. Colin Teo, head of department and consultant urologist at Khoo Teck Puat hospital on 19/9/2013. The results and performance of our prototype met our general objectives.