Infusion Therapy
Although infusion devices are one of the most used devices in clinical practice, they are prone to errors. Therefore, in 2010 the FDA started the infusion improvement initiative.1 However, 2017 infusion errors are still a major concern.2 Especially critical are drug infusions for newborns. They are a real challenge in today's clinical practice as neonates' bodies require extremely low flow rates (< 1 mL/h) of the drug to be infused. However, syringe infusion pumps, which are now the standard have serious problems with reliable drug delivery, such as startup delays, occlusion detection and hydrostatic siphoning. These problems cannot be detected by the current infusion pumps and they may put the patients at risk.
The goal of this research project is to investigate on how to improve infusion therapy with new sensor technology and to investigate how appropriate testing environments such as a hardware-in-the-loop testbench can support the infusion device development. Here we collaborate with the medtech start-up external page1nfusioncall_made for the development of a novel and safe infusion device.