Identifying human body states by using a flexible integrated sensor

Abstract

Flexible sensors are required to be lightweight, compatible with the skin, sufficiently sensitive, and easily integrated to extract various kinds of body vital signs during continuous healthcare monitoring in daily life. For this, a simple and low-cost flexible temperature and force sensor that uses only two carbon fiber beams as the sensing layer is reported in this work. This simple, flexible sensor can not only monitor skin temperature changes in real time but can also extract most pulse waves, including venous waves, from most parts of the human body. A pulse diagnostic glove containing three such flexible sensors was designed to simulate pulse diagnostic methods used in traditional Chinese medicine. Wearable equipment was also designed in which four flexible sensors were fixed onto different body parts (neck, chest, armpit, and fingertip) to simultaneously monitor body temperature, carotid pulse, fingertip artery pulse, and respiratory rate. Four important physiological indicators—body temperature (BT), blood pressure (BP), heart rate (HR), and respiratory rate (RR)—were extracted by the wearable equipment and analyzed to identify exercise, excited, tired, angry, and frightened body states.

Flexible Wearable Sensors for Cardiovascular Health Monitoring

“…Reproduced under the terms of CC BY 4.0. [ 135 ] Copyright 2020, Springer Nature. e) The flexible ultrasonic device conformably contacting the skin with 4 × 5 piezoelectric transducer units (left), providing accurate CBP readings compared with commercial monitor (right).…”

“…PTT, the time interval for the pulse waves travelling between two arterial sites, which can be calculated from the detected PPG, BCG, SCG, or pressure signals etc., has been widely used for continuous BP estimation [ 100,133,134,135 ] based on various mathematical models. [ 18 ] However, sensors for recording the above‐mentioned signals are susceptible to motion artifacts.…”

“…PTT was extracted from two pulse waves recoded on the left carotid artery and the left index finger, and BP can be subsequently calculated. [ 135 ]…”

Flexible Electronics and Healthcare Applications

“…The development of flexible electronics overcome the disadvantage that inorganic electronics cannot be integrated on curved surfaces, so applications of electronic products have been greatly expanded. Flexible transistors, flexible capacitors and flexible sensors are typical flexible electronic components; all have been integrated into complex circuits for applications in health care (Ray et al, 2019;Chung et al, 2020;Hanna et al, 2020;Jin et al, 2020;Ma et al, 2020;Madhvapathy et al, 2020;Sun et al, 2020;Zhou et al, 2020).…”

Flexible Transparent Supercapacitors: Materials and Devices

“…An emerging proliferation in portable intelligent electronics is moving toward flexible and optically transparent devices, such as displays, [ 1 ] panels, [ 2 ] phone, [ 3 ] tablets, [ 4 ] and other touchable devices. [ 5 ] The ever‐growing market demands are driving advances in flexible transparent power sources with excellent energy storage activity and high optical transparency under deformation conditions. Supercapacitor is considered as one of the most essential energy sources due to its high power density, maintenance‐free, long lifespan, etc.…”