An Occlusion Detection System for Intravenous Infusion

Infusion pumps play a pivotal role in the medical field, ensuring the continuous and precisely controlled delivery of medications or nutrients. However, occlusions in the intravenous lines (IV lines) pose significant hurdles for infusion pump employment, which impact treatment effectiveness and even endanger patients’ lives. The conventional methods for detecting occlusions in IV lines do not simultaneously meet the requirements for noninvasiveness, high accuracy, and high consistency. Here, we report a design for a pressure waveform sensor (PWS) with a waveform-based recognition method to detect IV lines occlusions. To overcome the technical challenges, several attempts including the double-clamped beam structure and the waveform template matching algorithm (WTMA) are exploited in this work. The mechanical and electrical characteristics of the PWS are verified by theoretical analysis, numerical analysis, and experiments. Finally, the PWS with the WTMA is validated in commercial electrical infusion pumps, demonstrating no false positive alarms (FPAs) observed among a total injection volume of 80000 mL across ten infusion pumps with 50 infusion bags. The result underscores the tremendous potential of the system for IV lines occlusion detection.