Abstract

The continuous measurements of vital signs (body temperature, blood pressure, pulse wave, and respiration rate) are important in many applications across various fields, including healthcare and sports. To realize such measurements, wearable devices that cause minimal discomfort to the wearers are highly desired. Accordingly, a device that can measure multiple vital signs simultaneously using a single sensing element is important in order to reduce the number of devices attached to the wearer’s body, thereby reducing user discomfort. Thus, in this study, we propose a device with a microelectromechanical systems (MEMS)-based pressure sensor that can simultaneously measure the blood pulse wave and respiration rate using only one sensing element. In particular, in the proposed device, a thin silicone tube, whose inner pressure can be measured via a piezoresistive cantilever, is attached to the nose pad of a pair of eyeglasses. On wearing the eyeglasses, the tube of sensor device is in contact with the area above the angular artery and nasal cavity of the subject, and thus, both pulse wave and breath of the subject cause the tube’s inner pressure to change. We experimentally show that it is possible to extract information related to pulse wave and respiration as the low-frequency and high-frequency components of the sensor signal, respectively.

Highlights

  • Pulse wave and respiration rate are among the four fundamental vital signs in human beings, which indicate the state of a body’s life-sustaining functions

  • There has been growing interest in the use of wearable devices for continuous measurement of pulse wave and respiration rate instead of the traditional manual measurements performed by healthcare professionals

  • We proposed a method to simultaneously measure respiration rate and pulse wave study, wedevice proposed to simultaneously measuresensor

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Summary

Introduction

Pulse wave and respiration rate are among the four fundamental vital signs in human beings, which indicate the state of a body’s life-sustaining functions. Continuous pulse wave measurements can be used to develop methods for continuous monitoring of blood pressure [3,4,5,6]. State-of-the-art wearable devices for pulse wave measurement can be divided into two: Mechanical- and optical-based devices. For measurement of respiration rate, various wearable devices that can be attached to an area close to the nose, neck, or chest of a subject were previously proposed. These sensors determine the respiration rate by detecting changes in nasal airflow, respiratory sound, exhaled air temperature, exhaled air humidity, and CO2 concentration in exhaled air [14,15,16]

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