thermal Quantitative Sensory Tester
Team
Martin Brachmann
Dominik Czeschka
Oliver Dilch
Tutors
Dipl.-Ing. Gerhard Jüngling
Ing. Martin Sommer
tQST (thermal Quantitative Sensory Testing) is a project of the HTL 3
Rennweg in cooperation with the Viennese AKH.
A mobile prototype was
created for a doctor of the neurological department. The device is needed
to measure the temperature sensation of patients (e.g.: apoplectic stroke)
during visits. For that a thermod, mounted on the bottom side, is layed
onto the patient’s arm.
After the start of the measurement, taken by
the doctor, the thermod changes the temperature constantly. When the
patient feels a temperature change, he/she presses a button. Through this
acquired reaction the temperature is saved on a multimediacard. This
storage medium can be connected through a cardreader with a computer. With
the developed user software the patient data, with the associated
measurements, can be copied onto a PC and stored in a variety of formats.
So the measurement-data can be processed later too. On the integrated
LC-Display patient-data can be applied and changed, measured data can be
seen and measurements can be adjusted.
The technical realization of the requirements consists of the following
components:
microcontroller, multimediacard,
thermod
realising through a petlierelement, LC-Display, H-bridgesteering,
accumulator and developing the PC-application.
The microcontroller is used
for the processing of the program code and controls all connected hardware
components. It sends important data to the intelligent LC-Display and
monitors the accumulator-voltage. The multimediacard communicates over a
SPI-Interface with the microcontroller and the thermod is controlled by a
discrete H-bridge built out of unipolar-transistors.
The device is
supplied with 4 Mignon-accumulators (AA) with a capacity of 2200mAh. High
currents of several hundreds milliampere flow shortly during the
measurements with the peltierelement.
The user software that was created
in Visual Basic, offers different options for changing the data, like
searching with different criteria and offers the opportunity to save data
as txt or csv-file in order to process it later.
HTL Wien 3 Rennweg, Mai 2007