Various bladder complications can be a significant medical issue for people across the world. Issues such as bladder incontinence have no real long-term solution available. Instead of long-term solutions, short term treatments are usually applied in order to remedy the symptoms of various bladder complications. The act of entirely replacing the human bladder with an artificial one has been raised as a possible solution by some professionals in the medical community. An ideal artificial bladder would have all the benefits of a regular human bladder but without the potential failings that a biological bladder could provide, such as weak and underdeveloped muscle tissues. In this project, we designed a mechanical and electrical prototype system capable of pumping fluid in and out of an artificial bladder while also measuring all flow values that result from the aforementioned pumping. My role in this project was to integrate all electrical hardware as an embedded system while also designing mounting brackets for all of the hardware.

We created our design for our protoype bladder system by choosing appropriate fluid pumps based on biological bladder flow rates. For the convenience of a user who would void their bladder, a requirement of 500mL/min pumping rate would be necessary. In addition, the user’s kidneys excrete urine at around an average rate of 1 mL/min. Three peristaltic pumps powered by DC motors were installed within our system to reflect these quantities. Two pumps were installed for delivery of urine from each respective kidney while the last pump pulled urine directly from the bladder in order to be voided from the system.

The rest of the system consisted of a blood bag representing a bladder as well as an exterior breadboard that held our system’s circuitry. The blood bag is connected to and in-between the two inflow pumps and the singular outflow pump. Motors and Arduino hardware connect to the exterior breadboard through several wires and connections.

The performance of the system was assessed via repeated trials of filling and voiding our artificial bladder system. The bladder would be filled to 90% capacity and then immediately be voided once that capacity was reached. Measuring the fluid volume was a two-stage process: one measurement was taken by the integration of flow values while another measurement was taken by capturing the fluid voided from the system and directly measuring the resultant volume. Absolute error of fluid volume in the bladder was maintained at around 2-3 mL while filling. The same absolute error value rose drastically to around 10 mL during the voiding process. This absolute error would increase by factor of 10 mL as multiple repeat trials occurred.

In conclusion, our results show that an artificial bladder is both technically feasible and can replicate regular bladder function. However, accumulated sensor error prevents this artificial bladder from working in the long-term as an implant. Future work would involve selecting more accurate and precise sensors while also miniaturizing the system for use in proof-of-concept design that could lead to eventual medical trials.