Towards Design and Development of a Soft Pressure Sensing Sleeve for Performing Safe Colonoscopic Procedures

In this paper, with the goal of enhancing the safety of current colonoscopic procedures and providing the pressure and location of the contact between the colonoscope and the colon’s surface, we propose design and development of a unique Soft Pressure Sensing Sleeve (SPSS). SPSS can seamlessly be integrated with the existing colonoscopic devices and would not change the existing diagnosis workflow. The pressure sensing of SPSS is performed based on the resistance change of a liquid metal (i.e., Gallium) embedded into several micro-channels located within SPSS’s deformable sleeve when it interacts with the colon surface. To demonstrate functionality of the SPSS, without loss of generality, in this paper, we designed and fabricated a SPSS with 4 sensing regions. We also proposed and experimentally evaluated an empirical calibration function for this sensor. Results demonstrate high accuracy (RMSE=2.45 and mean absolute error <3%) of the proposed calibration function compared with the evaluation experiments.