A laryngoscope is a surgical instrument used to facilitate endotracheal intubation task during general anaesthesia or mechanical ventilation. This task usually takes less than a minute, but requires very precise movements and force control ability; otherwise it may result in serious damages to the patient incisors, larynx, spinal column, changes in heart rate and/or blood-pressure.
This work presents a prototype of a device that can be easily adapt to a common laryngoscope, which allows the measurement of the force applied between the handler and the blade. The force measurements are acquired by a bluetooth® data acquisition module and transmitted to a portable computer for data recording and analysis. Real-time force information is provided to laryngoscopists and alarm triggered as desired by according to the user settings. The software application – Laring Monitor - was built in Free Pascal and is able to be run in different operating systems (Windows, Linux and Mac X).