Early Access Note:
Early Access articles are new content made available in advance of the final electronic or print versions and result from IEEE’s Preprint or Rapid Post processes. Preprint articles are peer-reviewed but not fully edited. Rapid Post articles are peer-reviewed and edited but not paginated. Both these types of Early Access articles are fully citable from the moment they appear in IEEE Xplore.
Pelvic floor disorders are caused by weakening or damage to the tissues lining the bottom of the abdominal cavity. These disorders affect nearly 1 in every 4 women in the United States and symptoms that drastically diminish a patient’s quality of life. Vaginal closure force is a good measure of pelvic health, but current vaginal dynamometers were not designed for the rigors of hospital reprocessing, often failing due to sensor degradation through repeated sterilization processes. In order to obtain measurements of vaginal closure force in a large study, we designed a vaginal dynamometer that utilizes a removable intra-abdominal sensor already in production for the study. The sensor’s existing data acquisition system was modified to transmit to a tablet allowing the user to view data in real-time. The new speculum design allowed a single sensor to measure vaginal closure force before being used to collect intra-abdominal pressure data in the same study visit. The measurements taken with the new speculum were similar to measurements taken with a previously reported vaginal dynamometer.
