PIC Microcontroller Based Venous Muscle Pump Test

Introduction: Design and development of a prototype unit to measure venous refilling time (VRT) and muscle pump capacity (MPC) during a venous muscle pump test (VMPT) is presented here. Instead of normalizing the photo-plethysmo-graph (PPG), as is common in the VMPT instruments in vogue, a suitable signal processing technique that extracts a signal proportional only to the blood volume changes underneath the PPG sensor is employed.

Based on an appropriate model for the propagation of light through skin and tissue, a novel signal processing method is proposed for the measurement of VRT. The proposed technique renders the measurement of VRT independent of not only the color of the skin of a patient also of intensity and detects sensitivity. Block Diagram:

In Signal acquisition part, we acquiring signal from sensor & fed to the Signal conditioning circuit. The current through the IR LED is set as 16 mA by suitably selecting the value of R1. The photodiode is connected to one of the inputs of LOG112 logarithmic amplifier manufactured by Texas Instruments**. The other input of the LOG112 is fed from

Dayananda Sagar College of Engineering, Bangalore

its internal reference voltage VR (= 2.5 V) through resistor RR. The value of RR is chosen such that the output vlog of the LOG112 is ln(Io ). Log112 nonlinear trans-impedance amplifier that converts a photodiode current in to a voltage. The output of the LOG112 is fed as one of the inputs to a difference amplifier realized with the auxiliary opamp (OA1) available inside the LOG112 IC. The second input of the difference amplifier is derived from the output of a sample and hold circuit realized with an LF398, manufactured by National Semiconductors. The input to the sample and hold circuit is also the output of LOG112. The output of the difference amplifier is further amplified by a factor of 100 employing an inverting amplifier with OP07 opamp (OA2). The output of OA2 is given as input to the digital measurement and control unit. The digital measuring system is Microcontroller Unit, in this unit the output of signal condition circuit is input of the Microcontroller Unit. It is connected to port RA0. Here it converts Analog signal in to Digital signal. Using serial communication, we fed the digital signal to computer. Components Used:

PIC MICROCONTOLLER (PIC16F877)

LOG112 IC LF398 PPG sensor etc

Reference: A Digital Instrument for Venous Muscle Pump Test

Bhooma G* , Kokila S*, Jayanthi K* and Jagadeesh Kumar V# *Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Pondicherry Engineering College, Puducherry 605014

Dayananda Sagar College of Engineering, Bangalore