A device to assess the severity of peripheral edema

Peripheral edema causes swelling in extremities that often indicates the presence of a serious medical condition. Currently, clinicians visually observe fluctuations in edema symptoms to assess edema severity. The subjective nature of these assessments hinders clinicians from accurately communicating a patient's condition to other medical professionals and leads to inconsistencies in medical treatment. To eliminate subjectivity in edema measurement, we developed a handheld device that uses a manually depressed probe to objectively measure the depth of pitting from edema and the force required to depress the tissue, which correlate directly to edema severity. Clinicians can collect these values from the device over time to monitor a patient's progress and improve the accuracy of medical diagnosis.