CAPILLARY REFILL TIME MEASUREMENT DEVICE

Capillary refill time (CRT) can be defined as a rapid clinical test for assessing blood flow through peripheral tissues. Importance of the monitarisation of the CRT is emphasized in diagnosis and treatment guideleness for shock. The capillary refill test is currently conducted manually and its implementation varies according to medical personnel. There isn’t any commercial device that standardizes both the magnitude and the duration of the force applied for sensing the perfusion of the capillaries. A microcontroller based device is designed to measure the capillary refill time. An infrared led is used as a light source. Also a linear actuator is used to able to apply a constant force during a constant time to the fingertip. We evaluated our design on one healthy volunteer and one thalassemia carrier by performing 30 measurements. It is known that thalassemia carriers may have prolonged capillary refill time which is consistent with our measurements obtained by the proposed design