Identifying human body states by using a flexible integrated sensor

Ying Jin,Jiajia Hu,Kete Lao,Min Yang,Songhui Li,Zhundong Li,Jinxiu Wen,Xiaoyan Hu,Jingcheng Huang,Jianyi Luo,Guoning Chen,Honggui Deng,Yong Lu,Baowen Liang,Yufeng Gan,Zhiming Chen

doi:10.1038/s41528-020-00090-9

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.

Highlights

IntroductionReal-time monitoring of the state of the human body is very important for human healthcare; due to the high costs and inconvenience of the monitoring equipment, monitoring technology is often only applied in the intensive care units of hospitals
Real-time monitoring of the state of the human body is very important for human healthcare; due to the high costs and inconvenience of the monitoring equipment, monitoring technology is often only applied in the intensive care units of hospitals. If this technology could be extended to wearable equipment that could continuously monitor the health of any patient and even healthy individuals in daily life, early warnings or diagnoses of disease could be obtained for subhealthy people and body states could be identified by learning the vital data from the bodies of healthy people
Property characterization of the flexible sensor A flexible sensor for human health monitoring was designed in our work, which integrates pressure/force and temperature sensing on a 1 cm × 1 cm flexible printed circuit board (FPCB) substrate (Fig. 1a)

Summary

Introduction

Real-time monitoring of the state of the human body is very important for human healthcare; due to the high costs and inconvenience of the monitoring equipment, monitoring technology is often only applied in the intensive care units of hospitals. If this technology could be extended to wearable equipment that could continuously monitor the health of any patient and even healthy individuals in daily life, early warnings or diagnoses of disease could be obtained for subhealthy people and body states (such as fatigue, excitement, or fear) could be identified by learning the vital data from the bodies of healthy people. The integration of different kinds of sensors into wearable equipment that are compliant with our skin remains challenging

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion