IoT Based Smart Saline Level Monitoring System

Abstract

Saline, one of the most popular intravenous (IV) therapy plays a major role in the management of patients who are critically ill. Surveillance of saline bottle level is very important because when the bottle is emptied and the needle is not removed from the vein then the blood flows outward into the bottle. In hospitals, the nurses or caretakers are responsible for monitoring the saline bottle level. Mostly, due to negligence and any unusual condition, the exact timing of removing the needle from the patient’s vein is ignored which causes a serious casualty and may lead to death as well. Furthermore, remote monitoring is a need to provide telehealth services. To prevent the accident due to the ignorance of caretakers and to provide remote surveillance in telehealth services, we have proposed the cost-effective smart saline level monitoring device which includes the combination of sensor and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies. We have built this system by using load sensor and ultra-low power low cost ESP32 WiFi System on Chip (SoC) microcontroller. The load sensor converts the weight of the bottle to a specific voltage. The ESP32 microcontroller generates and publishes a specific message based on the voltage received from the sensor. To publish and present the messages to the devices (e.g. smartphone, tablet, laptop etc.) of subscribers like doctors, nurses or caretakers, we have used MQTT-S publish/subscribe protocol which runs over TCP. This proposed monitoring system fulfills the reliable delivery of messages to the subscribers which is very important for healthcare.