• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.21 no.11
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• pp.1038-1043
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• 2015

When the study on the relationship between the Head-of-Bed (HOB) angle and ventilator-associated pneumonia is performed, the fact that the HOB angle can only be measured intermittently imposes a significant limitation on the study. Therefore, there has been demand for the development of a device that can measure the HOB angle continuously. In this paper, we propose the rapid prototyping of an HOB measurement system using open-source hardware and software. The proposed system helps to maintain the HOB angle at a particular angle by displaying the angle and helps the medical study of pneumonia patients by enabling continuous data acquisition. Firstly, we eliminate the process of making an MCU board by utilizing an open-source hardware mbed LPC1768. Secondly, we reduce the software development time by using libraries and hence enabling the easy use of peripherals. Thirdly, for rapid prototyping, we build the enclosure of the proposed system using a 3D printer. The proposed system can be attached and detached to and from a bed. Therefore, we can attach it to the bed of a patient for whom measurement of the HOB angle is necessary. Finally, we check the measurement performance and the validity of the proposed system through an experiment utilizing an incremental encoder.