Abstract
Performing real-time monitoring for human vital signs during sleep at home is of vital importance to achieve timely detection and rescue. However, the existing smart equipment for monitoring human vital signs suffers the drawbacks of high complexity, high cost, and intrusiveness, or low accuracy. Thus, it is of great need to develop a simplified, nonintrusive, comfortable and low cost real-time monitoring system during sleep. In this study, a novel intelligent pillow was developed based on a low-cost piezoelectric ceramic sensor. It was manufactured by locating a smart system (consisting of a sensing unit i.e. a piezoelectric ceramic sensor, a data processing unit and a GPRS communication module) in the cavity of the pillow made of shape memory foam. The sampling frequency of the intelligent pillow was set at 1000 Hz to capture the signals more accurately, and vital signs including heart rate, respiratory rate and body movement were derived through series of well established algorithms, which were sent to the user’s app. Validation experimental results demonstrate that high heart-rate detection accuracy (i.e. 99.18%) was achieved in using the intelligent pillow. Besides, human tests were conducted by detecting vital signs of six elder participants at their home, and results showed that the detected vital signs may well predicate their health conditions. In addition, no contact discomfort was reported by the participants. With further studies in terms of validity of the intelligent pillow and large-scale human trials, the proposed intelligent pillow was expected to play an important role in daily sleep monitoring.
Highlights
Sleep disorder symptoms are common, and nearly a billion people suffer from a variety of sleep disorders such as insomnia, sleep apnea and restless legs syndrome, with a wide range of age.[1,2] Sleep problem has become a major public health issue worldwide.[3]
The heart-rate detection accuracy is higher than that of a recent study (i.e. 98.11% ± 2.6%) which proposed a health monitoring bedding system with two rows of piezoelectric ceramic sensors arranged under the mattress, and compared the testing results between the developed system and ECG using 10 healthy subjects.[13]
The intelligent system is composed of economically available materials, a main control board, a GPRS commutation module and mobile phone
Summary
Sleep disorder symptoms are common, and nearly a billion people suffer from a variety of sleep disorders such as insomnia, sleep apnea and restless legs syndrome, with a wide range of age.[1,2] Sleep problem has become a major public health issue worldwide.[3]. To overcome the above limitations of the current intelligent monitoring systems, a novel intelligent pillow (InPillow) embedded with a piezoelectric ceramic (PZT) sensor for real-time vital sign monitoring on sleep conditions was developed in this study to achieve multi-parameter detecting, high accuracy, low cost and non-intrusiveness.
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