• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.21 no.1
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• pp.34-44
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• 2018

An early detection of intravenous (IV) infiltration is essential to minimize the injuries during infusion therapy, which is one of the most important tasks for nurses in nursing settings. We report that bioelectrical impedance analysis is useful in the early detection of infiltration at puncture sites. When infiltration was intentionally induced in the vein of a pig's posterior ear, impedance parameters (R, $X_C$, $C_m$) showed significant differences before and after infiltration. In particular, the relative resistance ($R/R_{BI}$) decreased significantly at infiltration and then slowly decreased. This indicates that the vein in pig's ear is thin and the amount of surrounding subcutaneous tissue, and hence the infiltrated solution accumulates slowly after infiltration. However, when infiltration was induced in the vein of human's forearm, the relative resistance at 20 kHz decreased gradually over time. In the $R-X_C$ graph, the positions in the case of infiltration induced in the pig' ear shifted rapidly before and after infiltration, whereas the positions in the case of infiltration induced in the human's forearm moved gradually during infiltration. Our findings suggest that the impedance parameters (R, $R/R_{BI}$, $X_C$, R vs. $X_C$, and $C_m$) are effective indicators to detect the infiltration early in a non-invasive and quantitative manners.