Low-Cost IoT-Based Intravenous Fluid Monitoring System Using Load Cell Sensor and ESP8266

Intravenous (IV) fluid administration requires constant, strict clinical supervision to avoid severe patient safety hazards. When an IV bag runs empty without timely intervention, hydrostatic drop can induce a backward blood flow into the tubing line, leading to localized thrombosis, severe swelling, and infiltration at the cannulation site. Hospitals in Indonesia routinely operate with a nurse-to-patient ratio that leaves little room for constant bedside observation, and IV fluid replacement remains vulnerable to oversight. This study presents a low-cost monitoring system that reports the remaining IV fluid volume to hospital staff in real time, eliminating the need for room-by-room physical checks. The system combines a load cell and an HX711 amplifier to weigh the IV bag, an Arduino Uno for signal processing, and an ESP8266 module that pushes readings to a ThingSpeak cloud channel. A companion Android application built with MIT App Inventor subscribes to the same channel and displays the volume on the nurse's device. Hardware calibration tests yield an average error of 0.2% in the no-load state and approximately 5% near the full-load condition of 0.5 kg. End-to-end data delivery between the sensor node, ThingSpeak, and the Android client completed within two and a half minutes across every trial, whether the transmitter and receiver shared a room or sat in different locations. The primary contribution of this work lies in the empirical validation of an ultra-low-cost, non-invasive, direct-weighing architecture that achieves ward-level monitoring accuracy for inexpensive, presenting a highly scalable framework for resource-constrained medical environments.

Keywords: Intravenous Fluid, Load Cell, ESP8266, ThingSpeak, Internet of Things, Remote Monitoring