Research And Design Of Hygroscope For Tongue Moisture

Tongue Diagnosis is one of the essential methods of traditional Chinese medical diagnosis. The accuracy of tongue diagnosis can be improved by tongue characterization. As an important part of tongue diagnosis, inspection of the tongue moisture can reveal the physiques and natural endowment of patients, help clinical discrimination and diagnosis, predict the progress and prognosis of illness, guide the determination of therapeutic principle and selection of drugs as well. Meanwhile, it makes for the study and calculation of the bio-heat transfer.This paper is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) under the project of"The Relationship between Heat Transfer Mechanism in Tongue Body and Traditional Medicine". After introduced basic conceptions of moisture measurement, mass transfer was presented to inspect tongue moisture. In this subject, hardware circuits of the system were designed based on ATMEL's AT89S8252 single-chip computer and digital humidity-temperature sensor SHT11. This hygroscope finds itself with some attractive features, such as portability, handy operation, low power consumption, etc. It has been proved that the standard deviation of this tester, which is only 2.9%, is better than that of other conventional instruments, and the degree of tongue moisture could be measured rapidly and exactly. In the end, hygroscope for tongue moisture was used to examine 61 patients with coronary heart disease. Results showed the relationship between tongue moisture and pathology of the disease.