Abstract
Uroflowmetry is a convenient clinical test to screen the benign prostatic hyperplasia(BPH) common in the aged men. A load cell is located beneath the urine container to measure the weight of urine. However, it is sensitive to the impact applied on the bottom of the container by the urine stream, which could be a noise source lowering the reliability of the system. With this aim, our study proposed a noise reduction technique by computing ensemble average of the weighted signals that were acquired from three-load cells forming a regular triangle beneath the urine container. Simulated urination experiment was performed with three different collection methods, all of which demonstrated significant noise reduction by ensemble averaging. Furthermore, the best results can be obtained without any special urine collection devices. Thus, our novel method can be usefully applied to uroflowmetry for enhancing measurement in terms of accuracy and reliability.
