초록
Cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) is performed by thoracic compression and artificial ventilation for the patient under emergent situation to maintain at least the minimum level of respiration and blood circulation for life survival. Good quality CPR requires monitoring respiration, however, traditional respiratory air flow transducers cannot be used because the transducer elements are facing the whole area perpendicular to the flow axis. The present study developed a new air flow transducer conveniently applicable to CPR. Specially designed "sensing rod" samples the air velocity at 3 different locations of the flow cross-section, then transforms into average dynamic pressure by the Bernoulli's law. The symmetric structure of the sensing holes of the sensing rod enables bi-directional measurement simply by taking the difference in pressure by a commercial differential pressure transducer. Both inspiratory and expiratory flows were obtained with symmetric measurement characteristics. Quadratic curve fitting provided excellent calibration formula with a correlation coefficient>0.999 (P<0.0001) and the mean relative error<1%. The present results can be usefully applied to accurately monitor the air flow rate during CPR.