• Capacitive Pressure Sensors

In the present work, the design of a catheter prototype for High Resolution Manometry (HRM) using capacitive sensing technology has been developed with the aim of overcoming the current state of the art drawbacks.
In the last few decades, new technologies have been implemented to permit greater understanding of the esophagus functionalities. In this context, HRM has gained much popularity over the years and it is now considered the gold standard in evaluating esophageal motor disorders. Nevertheless, the technology used to perform HRM tests currently faces some limitations such as expensiveness, poor flexibility of the catheter, discomfort of the patient during the procedure and, in some difficult cases, failure of the catheter introduction.
In this work some promising results have been achieved: the developed prototype has been tested and compared to the state of the art demonstrating improved mechanical performances and a reliability of the pressure measurements with a mean error of 8%.
A completely new feature has also been introduced on the device allowing the use of endoscopic tools to guide the probe introduction into the patient nares.