Abstract
The World Health Organization has declared COVID-19 a pandemic. The demand for devices or systems to diagnose and track COVID-19 infections noninvasively not only in hospitals but also in home settings has led to increased interest in consumer-grade wearables. A common symptom of COVID-19 is dyspnea, which may manifest as an increase in respiratory and heart rates. In this paper, a novel piezoelectric strain sensor is presented for real-time monitoring of respiratory and heartbeat signals. A highly sensitive and stretchable piezoelectric strain sensor is fabricated using a piezoelectric film with a serpentine layout. The thickness of the patterned PVDF flexible piezoelectric strain sensor is only 168 μm, and the voltage sensitivity reaches 0.97 mV/μɛ. The effective modulus is 13.5 MPa, which allows the device to fit to the skin and detect the small strain exhibited by the human body. Chest vibrations are captured by the piezoelectric sensor, which produces an electrical output voltage signal conformally mapped with respiratory–cardiac activities. The separate heart activity and respiratory signals are extracted from the mixed respiratory–cardiac signal by an empirical mode decomposition data processing algorithm. By detecting vital signals such as respiratory and heart rates, the proposed device can aid early diagnosis and monitoring of respiratory diseases such as COVID-19.
Highlights
Cases of COVID-19 emerged at the end of December 2019
We found that IMF3 was the closest to the heartbeat signal, and IMF8 was the closest to the respiratory signal
This paper has proposed a sensitive piezoelectric stretchable strain sensor as the principal component of a highly stretchable wearable device that can be used to monitor the vital signs of human breathing and heartbeat
Summary
Cases of COVID-19 emerged at the end of December 2019. It has since spread rapidly throughout the world, with more than one hundred million reported cases, and is a critical global public health threat. COVID-19 is highly contagious, and infected patients show a wide range of symptoms, with some being completely asymptomatic but others dying from acute pneumonia. With the rapid development of stretchable electronic devices, recent studies have proposed various wearable human motion sensors that can be used in conformal contact with human skin for monitoring of activities.. With the rapid development of stretchable electronic devices, recent studies have proposed various wearable human motion sensors that can be used in conformal contact with human skin for monitoring of activities.4–6 These sensors have shown great potential in human–computer interaction and health monitoring applications. Since the piezoelectric material has only a pulsed output voltage or current during a change in strain, the background noise is very small when such a device is tracking the dynamic movement of the human body, which significantly improves the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the sensor.. A highly sensitive and stretchable piezoelectric strain sensor (HSPS) for monitoring both breathing and heartbeat is designed and fabricated using a serpentine grid of geometric piezoelectric film. The high sensitivity and stretchability of this wearable HSPS will allow real-time and accurate monitoring of respiration and heartbeat, which could potentially be used for COVID-19 self-diagnosis
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