Pengfei Niu, PhD | Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences; Sheng Zhou, PhD; Huimin Li, MS; Yuan Wang, MS; Wei Wei, MS; Zhiyuan Zhao, MS
Competition Sponsor: Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences
Awardee Year: 2025
The population affected by bladder dysfunction is substantial. Catheters are invasive and prone to cause infections, while traditional ultrasound monitoring relies on manual operation, making it difficult to meet the needs of intelligent care in multiple scenarios. Consequently, there is an increasingly urgent clinical demand for continuous non-invasive monitoring of bladder volume. This project is to develop an intelligent ultrathin ultrasound patch to monitor bladder volume, with the vision to be used for scenarios such as postoperative rehabilitation, home care and so on. It is implemented with piezoelectric micromachined ultrasonic transducer (PMUT), which is developed by micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS) technology and holds advantages of ultra-compact size, low power consumption and low cost. These characteristics enable the miniaturization as well as disposability of wearable ultrasound patch, which well favors its wide application among patients. To this end, one of our focuses is to reveal the quantity as well as the arrangement of PMUT chips required on the wearable patch for accuratly calculating the bladder volume during the entire urine filling process. Moreover, great efforts are made on the development of effective intelligent algorithms to precisely form the three dimensional shape of the bladder with various amount of urine with the sensed bladder walls. Collaborative optimization of hardware and algorithms is done to achieve exact urine volume in real time. Then reliable integration of rigid silicon chips within flexible and stretchable matrix is unveiled to form ultrathin wearable patch. Our aim is to move bladder monitoring toward intelligent wearable solutions.