Abstract
Uroflowmetry is non-invasive and easily performed to diagnose benign prostate hypertrophy (BPH) frequent in aged men. Weight change during urination is usually measured to estimate the urinary flow rate by a load cell, but sensitive to any impacts against the bottom of the container, leading to unnecessary noise generation. Moreover, load cells are relatively expensive raising the production cost. The present study proposed a new technique, measuring hydraulic pressure on the bottom of the urine container to evaluate the urinary flow rate. Low cost pressure transducer enabled almost perfectly linear relationship between the urine volume and the hydraulic pressure. During both the simulated and human urination experiment, variance of the pressure signal was more than 50 % smaller than the weight signal acquired by a load cell, which demonstrated that the impact noise was decreased to a great degree by pressure compared to weight measurement.
