According to the MARPOL 73/78 of Convention, all ships should have oil filtering equipment and 15 ppm bilge which satisfy Requirements of MARPOL 73/78. This study is concerned with designing and manufacturing a prototype Oil content Meter(OCM) used in machinery area of ship. The prototype OCM is composed of two parts which are oil content sensing module and data processing unit. The oil content sensing module consists of infra-red light source, photo-diode light receivers, and a glass tube for bilge water sample. The data processing unit has a micro-processor as hard core and peripheral devices. The experimental results of prototype OCM and analysis of collected data reveal linear property between transmitted light and scattered light as long as the bilge water has low level content of oil. And this linear property leads to a oil content detecting method which is programmed and loaded into the data processing unit. The performance of the prototype OCM is compared with that of the commercial OCM in the market.