上海科技大学知识管理系统

Monitoring bladder volume is an essential application for patients with voiding dysfunction. Current wearable ultrasonic bladder monitors are rigid, bulky and cannot conform to human skin. This study presents a stretchable and wearable ultrasonic transducer array that can both conform to non-planar skin surfaces and continuously monitor bladder volume. The wearable transducer array mainly consists of 4 × 4 piezoelectric transducer elements, stretchable serpentine-based electrodes for electrical interconnection, electrically conductive adhesive as both matching and backing layers, and silicone elastomer for encapsulation. The transducer array has a center frequency of 3.9 MHz, -6 dB acoustic bandwidth of 57.6%, and up to 40% elastic stretchability. The volume of balloon-bladder phantom was estimated by a least square ellipsoid fitting method. With the true volume of balloon-bladder phantoms ranging from 10 mL to 405 mL, the proposed transducer array has a mean absolute percentage error of 9.4%, a mean absolute error of 11.9 mL and a coefficient of determination of 0.975, which demonstrates the capability of the proposed stretchable and wearable ultrasonic transducer array for bladder volume monitoring application.