Pressure Monitoring System in Gastro-Intestinal Tract

Diseases in the gastro-intestinal tract are on an increasing trend. In order to diagnose a patient, various signals of the digestive organ, such as temperature, pH, and pressure, can offer the helpful information. Among the above mentioned signals, we choose the pressure variation as a monitoring signal. The variation of a pressure signal of the gastro-intestinal tract can offer the information of a digestive trouble or some clues of the diseases. In this paper, a pressure monitoring system for the digestive organs of a living pig is presented. This is why a pig's gastro-intestinal tract is very similar as human's. This system concept is to transmit the measured biomedical signals from a transmitter in a living pig to a wireless receiver that is positioned out of body. The integrated solution includes the swallow type pressure capsule and the receiving set consisting of a receiver, decoder circuit. The merit of the proposed system is that the monitoring system can supply the precise and a durable characteristic to measure and to transmit a signal in the gastro-intestinal tract. We achieved the pressure tracings in digestive organs and verified the validity of system after several in-vivo tests using the pressure monitoring system. Through various experiments, we found each organ has its own characterized pressure fluctuation.