The pulse oximeter, also called an oxygen saturometer, is a measuring device widely used by medical personnel to monitor the body’s oxygen concentration.
The technology of the device is based on measuring the color difference between oxygenated and deoxygenated cells. A pulse oximeter is also capable of giving a person’s heart rate in real time. With the Omron Nissei pulse oximeter buy you can be sure of the quality.
A little physiology
- Human blood is made up of red blood cells, one third of which is hemoglobin.
- Hemoglobin is made up of iron atoms which bind to oxygen molecules forming oxyhemoglobin.
- Oxygen in this form is transferred to cells.
- When the heart contracts, it sends blood filled with oxygen to the blood vessels.
- When it expands, it sucks oxygen-poor blood back from the veins.
- Well-oxygenated blood is bright red in color while deoxygenated blood is darker in color.
- This color variation visualized with the naked eye can also be quantified by a physical method based on colorimetry.
- The Pulse oximeter actually measures the light transmitted by a beam of light in blood contained in a blood vessel at a certain wavelength.
The pulse
The pulse oximeter measures the concentration of oxygen in the blood? It is first of all a non-traumatic measuring device, that is to say that its implementation does not require causing lesions on the skin of a patient in order to analyze his blood.
- A standard device is composed of a sensor, a light source, a processor and a digital screen to visualize the measurement results.
- The pulse oximeter’s sensor typically sits on the tip of a finger or on the earlobe of an ear, and the data on the transmitted light beam is sent to a processor which transforms the signals into encryption.
- The device actually measures the pulsed oxygen saturation or SpO2 converted into% by the processor of the pulse oximeter .
- For a human being in perfect health, the normal rate is between 95 and 100% but can drop significantly for people in poor health, smokers or even people who have been exposed to carbon monoxide.
The percentage in fact expresses the proportion of oxyhemoglobin in the blood of a person at a time T and by difference the complementary proportion of de-oxyhemoglobin.
A specialist will ideally be able to position a pulse oximeter in order to measure an individual’s heart rate which is given by the rate of change in the intensities of SpO2.
The classic thermometer
This is the traditional thermometer, the one we all know and whose globe was placed in the patient’s mouth to know his body temperature. Reliable, simple and practical, it has been produced without mercury since 1999 and instead contains an alloy of gallium, indium and tin called galinstan. It is the expansion of this alloy which, under the effect of heat, causes the liquid to rise in the column of the thermometer.