Diarrhea-induced dehydration is the second leading cause of death in children under 5 years of age, with over 500,000 deaths around the world every year. Intravenous (IV) fluids are a tried and tested means of treatment, but pediatric wards in low-income hospitals will often forgo treatment entirely. Many low-income hospitals lack basic medical infrastructure, including adequate numbers of medical staff. In these low-resource settings, costs are often cut by only ordering 1000 mL IV bags in bulk, and it’s the job of a nurse to stop the IV-drip after the patient has received a certain amount of fluids. If nurses in these settings are overworked or understaffed, they may forget to stop a dehydrated child’s IV-drip, resulting in patient overhydration and eventual death. Thus, doctors in these settings will often avoid IV-drip rehydration treatment altogether in order to prevent an accidental death, and families will be scared to send their dehydrated child to a hospital in fear of their child dying from the treatment.

Past solutions to solve this problem have either been too costly, difficult to manufacture, or do not operate well in an overcrowded, low-income hospital setting. There is thus a need for durable, easy to implement device to avoid overhydrating patients in areas where the amount of medical cases far outnumbers the hospital staff. We have created the IV drip auto-stop, a cheap, easy to manufacture electromechanical device, that automatically terminates flow from an IV once a threshold amount of fluid has been administered.

We hang the device on the IV-stand and then hang an IV-bag off of a load cell in the device in order to measure the weight differential of fluid in the IV-bag. This allows the device to read the volume administered through a simple weight to volume conversion. After a specified change in IV fluid volume has occurred, the IV-line to the patient is kinked by a servo motor driven mechanism further down the line, preventing overhydration via an unmonitored IV drip. The user can change the threshold volume via button press and note the current threshold and fluid output with a screen interface. The device is controlled by an Arduino Nano microcontroller. To house the electronics and the load cell mechanism, we have 3D printed a plastic casing. 

The cost of the device is less than 75 US dollars, which allows for use in areas that are economically underdeveloped. However, if this device were mass produced, the total cost of the auto-stop can be below \$50 per device. In initial tests, the clamp worked to stop flow of water through an IV tube within an accuracy of +-3 mL of fluid flow to the patient, with increasing accuracy for decreasing fluid velocity. In initial usability tests, all participants (17/17) were able to use the device’s functionality with little to no instruction. In addition, battery life has been shown to be greater than 8 hours. The cost, the accuracy, the usability, and the functionality make this device uniquely situated to help developing countries’ health care systems deal with fluid delivery.


IV Cutoff Mechanism for Low Resource Settings

Division / Sponsors: 
Aerospace, Bioengineering, Applied Mechanics, Design Engineering Division, Advanced Energy Systems, Manufacturing Engineering Division, Noise Control and Acoustics, Nondestructive Evaluation, Diagnosis, and Prognosis (NDPD), Nuclear Engineering Division, Process Industries Division, Fluids Engineering, Heat Transfer, Materials, Microelectromechanical Systems, Safety Engineering and Risk Analysis, Computers & Information in Engineering


Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/IMECE/IMECE2020/volume/84478

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