A multipoint thin film polymer pressure/force sensor to visualize traditional medicine palpations

Abstract

This paper describes a novel multipoint thin film polymer pressure/force sensor enabling detection of pressure/force pulse wave. The sensor features a high sensibility of 11mv/mmHg along with an extremely thin thickness of 100 µm and a high flexibility to adapt to the radial artery portion. The sensor uses charged cellular polymer as sensing layer, which contains 25 separated sensing dots to avoid signal interaction among these sensing points. The sensor attaches to a person's wrist to detect the radial artery vibration, while a physician palpates the artery vibration with his fingertips on it. The sensor is thin and flexible enough to let the artery vibration transmit through it without spoiling the physician's tactile feeling. That makes it possible to correlate the measured pressure/force pulse wave and the physician's pulse diagnosis in real time. That is useful for objectification and quantification of pulse palpation in traditional medicine.

Sensor-based Vital Sign Monitoring, Analysis and Visualisation for Ageing in Place

“…Interestingly, to date, force or tactile sensing has not been heavily researched for use in the measurement of human vital signs. One previous example used a range of force sensors such as multi-point polymer force/pressure sensors [20], Polyvinylidene Fluoride (PVDF) tactile array sensors [21] and piezoresistive tactile sensors [22] to measure BPM. Kerr et al, have developed algorithms to measure BPM, RR [23] and CRT using a BioTAC tactile sensor together with a RGB camera [24], and this will be discussed in Section II.…”