2011 IEEE 17th International Symposium for Design and Technology in Electronic Packaging (SIITME)

Measurement Platform for Atmospheric Pressure Sensors

I. Bosznai, G. Harsnyi
Department of Electronics Technology,
Budapest University of Technology and Economics
H-1111 Budapest, Goldmann Gy. t. 3. Building V2
boris@ett.bme.hu

Abstract This paper presents a system which handles different

pressure sensors. The purpose of the development is to measure
pressure in the human bladder. The proposed measurement
device monitors the pressure inside the bladder of the patient,
and records the reaction of the bladder to the increased pressure.
The device also measures the natural filling of the bladder for
days; the results are then prepared for further evaluation by a
physician. A PCB was realized that can handle different pressure
sensors in order to differentiate between them. To display the
pressure real-time a MATLAB based software was also
developed.
Keywords:
incontinence

pressure

sensor,

PCB,

MATLAB,

has. With this system the urologist can make diagnosis easily
and more accurately, while the device is unnoticeable for the
patient, who can live his daily routine without having an
impact of the quality of the life. The pressure inside the
bladder is usually within the 0 and 30 Hgmm range that is 0 to
40hPa in SI, so a sensor capable of measuring 1100hPa is
required [3]. The shape and the encapsulation of the sensor are
really important it cannot irritate the wall of the bladder
making unwanted contractions; the encapsulation also has to
withstand the sterilization process.

urinary

II.
I.

INTRODUCTION

Urinary incontinence affects large numbers of adults,

especially older adults, with an estimated 200 million adults
worldwide having this life-altering condition. There are
several different types of urinary incontinence [1], some of
them can be cured with surgery, and the rest can be cured only
with appropriate medicine. Stress incontinence, also known as
effort incontinence, is due essentially to insufficient strength
of the pelvic floor muscles. This type of incontinence can be
cured with surgery, the other type cannot. That type is called
an Urge incontinence what is the involuntary loss of urine
occurring for no apparent reason while suddenly feeling the
need or urge to urinate. There could be several reasons for the
urge incontinence for example multiple sclerosis, spina
bifida, Parkinson's disease, strokes and spinal cord injury and
so on. Urologists need to differentiate between the two types
of incontinence, but this is difficult because the time for one
patient is limited, and the test may not be conclusive. The
currently wide-spread measurement devices use a catheter to
measure the pressure, and applying and artificial filling of the
bladder, this method is called cystography which is
uncomfortable for the patient, and sometimes a single
measurement is not enough to make a precise decision [2],
also inserting a catheter and filling the bladder can be very
uncomfortable for the patient. The aim of the development is
to create a device that can monitor the pressure inside the
bladder; those pressure changes indicate a contraction in the
bladder and store the data for later evaluation. The evaluation
is done on a PC, the software analyses the measurement data,
and tries to identify which urinary incontinence the patient

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EXPERIMENTAL

A. The description of the system and its components

In order to measure pressure in the bladder a probe is
needed to be inserted through the urinal tract. The size and the
elasticity of the tract is very limited so the diameter of the
device is very limited as well. Including the catheter the
diameter cannot exceed 10mm; the wall of the catheter is
usually 2mm that means the diameter of the device should be
no more than 6mm, which is very small. The length of the
device is limited to maximum 20mm. The PCB in the device
should be at least 1mm smaller in width than the length of the
capsule, so it can be maximum 5x19 mm, which gives 2x0.95
cm2 surface for the components; to demonstrate how small is
that one side of a sugar cube is 1 cm2. The components will be
placed on both top and bottom side of the PCB, that is why the
equation has a multiplier of two. The encapsulation of the
system is a capsule shape with rounded edges that mean no
harm, or irritation to the bladder wall. As mentioned in the
introduction the aim is to measure the contractions of the
bladder, and if the capsule excites the wall making it to
contract, than the device will read false positive values. The
visualization of the system can be seen of Fig. 1. There are four
main parts, which will be discussed in detail later. The main
part of the system is a microcontroller that manages the sensor,
and transmits the data from the extracted device to the
computer. (2) The other very important part of the system is the
sensor (1) that needs to be very accurate in order to record
small contractions too. The controller stores the read pressure
value in an EEPROM memory (4), after the extraction the
contents of this EEPROM are transferred to the PC.

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2011 IEEE 17th International Symposium for Design and Technology in Electronic Packaging (SIITME)
the best one that is why a development system was built that is
capable of handling most pressure sensors. A series of test will
be done with each sensor, than the best one will be kept.
The pressure
requirements such as:

1. Figure the proposed system

The last component is the battery (3); there are three types
of batteries that are available in such small size:

Li-Polymer

Nickel-metal Hydride (NiMH)

Inductive

Li-Polymer batteries are widely-spread, and used in various

implantable medical devices such as artificial pacemakers.
There are NiMH batteries in very small size, but the small
sized ones cannot supply currents in mA magnitude, so it is not
alternative for Li-Polymer batteries. The last one is not really a
battery rather than an energy transfer method. It is called
wireless energy transfer what is based on two inductors, as in a
transformer. There are two windings on the transformer, the
firs one (called the primary) creates a varying magnetic flux in
the ferrite core, and this flux creates magnetic field which
creates alternating current in the second winding (called the
secondary). This is called a gapless transformer. If the primary
and the secondary windings are on separate ferrite cores, than
the effect is the same, but the efficiency is decreased. This
decrease of efficiency is a function of the length of the air gap.
Wireless or inductive energy transfer is based on this
transformer with air gap. One of the windings is stationary one,
which is the transmitter, or charger part of the system, and a
mobile one that is the receiver part. This main advantage of this
system is that the it does not need a charger part or a charging
connector. Besides that the lifetime of a Li-Polymer battery is
limited to 300 to 500 recharges [4], so after a certain time the
device will be useless. The Li-Polymer battery will be chosen
for the prototype devices, but the real solution would be a
wireless energy transfer system.
As mentioned earlier the capsule must not induce
contractions, so the encapsulation is very important as well.
BME-ETT
has
a
long
history
working
with
Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), for the first prototype PDMS
will be used. It belongs to the silicone group of the materials,
and also biocompatible, and has excellent mechanical
properties. PDMS is viscoelastic, meaning that at long flow
times, it acts like a viscous liquid, similar to honey. However,
at short flow times it acts like an elastic solid, similar to rubber
[5].
Choosing the best pressure sensor is essential to minimize
the power consumption and to get very accurate results. There
are several pressure sensors available; it is very hard to choose

978-1-4577-1277-7/11/$26.00 2011 IEEE

sensor

has

to

fulfill

several

Low power consumption

Small size
Compensation of the temperature
Cost efficient

There are two different types of pressure sensors the first

one is based on piezo-resistivity, the second on is based on
capacitance. In the pieso-resistive version the semiconductor
resistors are joined together in a bridge configuration to form a
so-called Wheatson bridge, the change of the resistors produce
a change in the output voltage of the bridge, this voltage can
be amplified, compensated, and sent to the microcontroller.
There are several resistive sensors available; one of them with
integrated electronics is the MPL115A2 from Freescale
semiconductor. This sensor is small-sized (3x5mm), has a low
power consumption of 20uA, and can sense pressures from
500hPa to 1150hPa which is in the desired range [6]. The only
drawback of the sensor is that its resolution is 1.5hPa; this is
mainly due to the 10 bit ADC integrated in the device, but
probably still enough to detect the contractions of the bladder.
The other type is based on capacitors, the sensor has a
surface; beneath that is an enclosed cavity with known
pressure. The surface of the deforming membrane and the
opposite side of one of the cavities are coated with metal.
Thus they form a capacitor whose value depends on the
distance of the plates and on the systems geometry. This type
of sensor always needs a capacitance measuring and
conditioning circuit. There are several companies that make
integrated pressure sensors. These sensors have the
capacitance, the electronics, and everything else for those
sensors, one example is the BMP085 sensor from BOSCH
Sensortec. The pressure sensing of this sensor is from 300 to
1100hPa, so it is within the desired range, and the resolution is
0.06hPa, which is 25 times better that the Freescale sensor.
The consumption is also lower, only 5uA in 1 sample / sec
mode. The only drawback of the sensor is the size which is
5x5mm, and this size cannot be fitted on the PCB. There is
another sensor from BOSCH, BMP180 what was introduced
in May 2011 which is smaller (3.6x3.8mm), and compatible
with the previous sensor. At the beginning of the development
BMP085 sensors were ordered from BOSCH, so the sensor
panels have these sensors soldered, but the final device will
probably have the BMP180 sensors in it, unless proven
otherwise. The compensation algorithm is more complicated
for the BOSCH sensor than the Freescale, the exact equation
can be found in the datasheet [7].
B. The development system
The development system has every component that was
mentioned in the previous section. Beside that it has an USB
interface for data transmission, and debugging purposes, and a

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2011 IEEE 17th International Symposium for Design and Technology in Electronic Packaging (SIITME)
connector for Li-Poly battery, and one for inductive charge
testing. This way both methods can be implemented, and
tested. The development system consists of two boards, the
controller, USB converter, memory are on the main board, and
the pressure sensor is on a small separate board. This way
several pressure sensor chips can be tested without making
any change to the main board itself. The schematic diagram of
the whole system can be seen on Fig. 2

since the microcontroller is very small mid-range type that has

no integrated USB peripheral, but the UART communication
is implemented in it. The converter is made by Future
Technology Devices Iternational, commonly known as FTDI
(4). The completed development board can be seen on Fig. 3
The pressure sensor, as mentioned before is on a separate
board, the main board has a five-pin connector (3) to the
sensor, where the supply and the serial lines connect to the
sensor. The pressure sensor will be discussed in detail later.
C. Software
The software consists of two main parts, one that runs on
the microcontroller that is the firmware of the device and one
that runs on a PC.

2. Figure - The diagram of the development system

As it can be see in figures 2 and 3 the microcontroller (1) is
the heart of the system, it is connected to all peripherals. The
development system has a PIC 8-bit microcontroller in it, the
type is 12F1822 the controller has an enhanced mid-range core
with 32MHz internal oscillator, and 2kbytes program memory
and can communicate via several seral communication
protocols. The RS-232 protocol is used to communicate with
the PC, the I2C, and SPI protocols are used to communicate
with the various sensors. The core consumes very little current
since it is one of the latest XLP Xtra Low
Powerconsumption cores. This is essential to maximize the
battery life, or less energy needed to be trasfered wirelessly to
the device. The device is available in SOIC-8 or 3x3 mm QFN
package, this can be fitted on the 5x19mm PCB.

Firmware is the control software of embedded systems. It

contains low-level operations, what is hidden from higher level
software. The PIC microcontroller is a Reduced Instruction Set
Computer (RISC) architecture that has only 49 instructions,
and some of them are C-compiler optimized. The firmware can
be written in assembly or C programming language using
Microchips own integrated development tool, MPLAB IDE.
The advantages of assembly is that it produces the fastest, and
smallest code, but it is very hard to understand, and very hard
to create simple routine whereas C is much more easier than
assembly, it uses common C commands as if, than, for etc. but
the size of the code will be always bigger than the assembly
counterpart. The output size of the code depends on the
optimization algorithm of the compiler and since the code is
bigger the execution will be slower a little. The current
application is not time critical, so the firmware was written in
C using the student version of Microchips PICC compiler.
After power on the device initializes the variables,
peripherals than checks which type of sensor is attached to the
board. This can be done several ways, in this case both of the
sensors communicate via I2C, so if the controller writes to a
specified I2C address and if it gets a reply (acknowledgement),
than that sensor is attached if the controller finds a valid sensor
than it loads the corresponding algorithm.

3. Figure -The realized development board

The pressure values are stored on an 512kbit EEPROM (2),
which can hold approximately 1 day of measurement data.
The final device will transmit this data to the PC what
evaluates them. This memory is available in SOIC-8 and QFN
packaging, where the size of the QFN package is 5x3mm, this
package is just the same as the width as the PCB. The
development board contains an RS-232 to USB converter

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4. Figure - Flow chart of the firmware

From now on the controller waits until a data request is sent
by the PC. When a request arrives the pressure and temperature
values are read from the sensor and are sent to PC, the

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2011 IEEE 17th International Symposium for Design and Technology in Electronic Packaging (SIITME)
temperature is required for the compensation algorithm. The
flow char of the firmware can be seen on Fig. 4

values. A silicone tube with 4mm outer diameter was attached

to a syringe and to the pressure sensor.

The software is a real time plotter program written in

Matlab. The software has compensation algorithms for both
sensors, so it requests the sensor type from the microcontroller,
after it is done the corresponding algorithm is loaded. A raw
pressure value is than requested from the microcontroller than
the compensated value is plotted.

7. Figure -The measurement setup

The pressure sensor side was fixed with BluTack, of course
it is not an air sealed connection, but it was not the aim of the
measurement. The used syringe was a 60ml one.

P1 V1 P2 V2 T const.
P2 P1

5. Figure - The flowchart of the PC software

Every time a when new value is calculated the plot is
refreshed, making it real-time. This loop is repeated until the
ESC key is pressed, or the sensor is removed from the main
board, than the software saves the data and exits. Another
software was developed in Matlab to display the recorded data,
record date, senor type and number. This software is quite
simple, loads the data, and plots it. A screenshot of this
software can be seen on Fig. 6

V1
T const.
V2

(1)

The test included setting the cylinder to 40ml than

compressing the air with 10ml pulling it back to 40ml than
extending the air with 10ml. This process will result in pressure
increase than a decrease. The pressure values can be calculated
as in Equation 1. First a pressure increase should happen, the
ratio of the V1 and V2 determines the resulting pressure in the
syringe, than a pressure decrease should happen. The ratio in
the first phase was 1.33 so if the baseline 105Pa is subtracted
the plot should go to 33kPa or so, and when the cylinder was
pulled back than the value should be at -20kPa. The result of
the measurement can be seen on Fig. 8

6. Figure - The display software

III.

RESULTS

Two pressure sensors were evaluated using the

development system. The first one is the MPL115A2 the other
one is the BMP085. The measurement setup consisted of a PC,
the development board with the sensors attached, and a syringe
filled with air. It is more important to know the pressure
change than the absolute pressure, so the software measures the
baseline pressure and extracts the value from all measured

978-1-4577-1277-7/11/$26.00 2011 IEEE

8. Figure - Test results

It can be seen on the graph that the first part of the curve
goes only to 25kPa, it is due to the weak sealing, and after
25kPa pressure the BluTack started to leak. The negative side

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2011 IEEE 17th International Symposium for Design and Technology in Electronic Packaging (SIITME)
of the curve is at -20kPa as expected. Several tests were made
with the different sensors, the results were nearly the same, the
sealing of the tube was always a problem. To avoid this
problem an air sealed compartment is to be designed in the
near future with that more accurate tests could be done. The
hand operated syringe will be switched to a syringe pump
where the measurements will be reproducible, and repeatable,
excluding the human error.
Conclusion of the development is that a system was
designed and realized that can handle various pressure sensors,
these sensors are capable of measuring pressure in the required
range. Besides the development board PC software were
written to record, display and recall the measurement data. The
functionality of the development system was demonstrated
with a simple test, from now on more accurate tests will be
done to evaluate sensors further.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work is connected to the scientific program of the
"Development of quality-oriented and harmonized R+D+I
strategy and functional model at BME" project. This project is
supported by the New Hungary Development Plan (Project
ID: TMOP-4.2.1/B-09/1/KMR-2010-0002).
.
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[4]
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[6]

[7]

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191

Urinary Incontinence Mary H. Palmer RN, C, MS, 1985 SLACK

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