Design and Development of IOT enabled IV infusion rate monitoring and control device for precision care and portability

This paper proposes a drip monitoring and control device that fits on the existing Intravenous (IV) infusion setup. Normally, doctors and nurses use their experience to estimate the time required for a drip bottle to be empty and for setting drip rate. This makes the IV infusion method to be vulnerable to human error and there are also other risks like back flow of the blood and many other if not attended when empty. This paper proposes an IoT (Internet of Things) based monitoring and control platform for IV infusion setup which enables doctors and nurses to monitor as well as control the IV infusion setup wirelessly while keeping the cost low and making the device highly reliable. The device can be divided into 3 units. The first unit houses an IR sensor for optical based drop detection, second unit houses a microcontroller with a 2.4Ghz Wi-Fi module and the other unit is the actuator to regulate drip rate. In addition, the device is tested along with different parameters like accuracy, stability, reliability, and battery capacity. Finally, the data from the IoT device is reliably transmitted to an online server using HTTP POST request (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol). Then this data is stored in a SQL (Structured Query Language) database and visualized on a webpage as well as a mobile app for easy readability. Also, the attendant could remotely control the device to set drip rate, shut or start and monitor the IV therapy.