A computerised real-time measurement system to locate the position of the urine stream in designing urine collection devices for women

A computerised real-time measurement system has been developed and tested for locating the position of the urine stream into a handheld urinal and onto a body-worn pad using arrays of resistive or optical sensors. Experimental data indicates that urine streams were usually scattered over quite a large cross-sectional area (typically 30 mm in the anterior/posterior direction) at the point of entry into handheld urinals. However, a correctly placed aperture of length 90 mm would have successfully received all the urine from the total of 36 clinical experiments run with seven women. Similarly, experiments to determine the initial position of the urine stream onto body-worn pads indicated that a target area of length 120 mm would have received the initial stream of urine from all 54 clinical experiments with 18 women. These data have been used to help with the design of a handheld urinal and a body-worn urine collection interface (the latter using the body-worn pad data) to be used in two variants of a new urine collection device for women (NICMS). Although both resistive and optical sensors provided useful data, the reliability of optical sensors was often compromised by droplets of urine splashing onto light sources or detectors. Future work should focus on protecting them from splashing.