Heart rate monitoring through the surface of a drinkware

Abstract

There is a growing demand for daily heart rate (HR) monitoring in the fields of healthcare, fitness, activity recognition, and entertainment. Although various HR monitoring systems have been proposed, most of these employ a wearable device, which may be a burden and disturb one's daily living. To achieve the goal of pervasive HR monitoring in our daily living, we present the HR monitoring method through the surface of a drinkware. The proposed method employs the surface of a drinkware as a broad sensing region, by expanding the principal of a basic photo-based HR sensor. The sensing surface works even with a curved shape, and it can be applied on various types of drinkwares. This approach enables unobtrusive HR monitoring during the beverage consumption. As a prototype, we implemented the proposed method on an ordinary transparent tumbler, and evaluated its HR monitoring performance.