패치형 무선 피부 온도 측정 시스템의 설계 및 구현

Abstract

In every large hospital, nurses must perform simple repetitive tasks such as measuring body temperature. Such tedious work reduces nurses motivation to provide quality medical care, which is an important element of the medical services provided by a hospital. If a device were available to measure body temperature, nurses could focus on the more important aspects of providing quality medical care to the patients. However, body temperature is generally measured from the throat, anus, tympanum or armpit, where it is difficult to affix a patch type device. In addition, general body temperature measuring points shows moving artifact error; therefore, it is not good point to continually measure the temperature. In this paper, a patch type skin temperature measuring system was developed. To appropriately measure the skin temperature, a thermal transducer was implemented with a thin (0.5 mm) temperature sensor. The system is small and thin (H6.6 ~ 5.3 ´ L35 ´ W24 mm), and weighs only 5 g including a battery, case and circuit; therefore, it is small and light enough to function as a patch type device. Moreover, the system worked for 5 days. To investigate differences between the experimental and conventional thermometer, simple clinical experiments were performed with 17 volunteers, and the result showed some correlation between the implemented system and conventional thermometer (Correlation coefficient = 0.647, P < 0.1).