Unique gel-coupled acoustic sensor array monitors human voice and physiology

Abstract

The health and performance of soldiers, firefighters, and other first responders in strenuous and hazardous environments can be continuously and remotely monitored with body-worn acoustic sensors. The Army Research Laboratory’s gel-coupled acoustic physiological monitoring sensor has acoustic impedance properties similar to the skin that facilitate the transmission of body sounds into the sensor pad, yet significantly repel ambient airborne noises due to an impedance mismatch. Acoustic signal processing detects physiological events such as heartbeats, breaths, wheezes, coughs, blood pressure, activity, motion, and voice for communication and automatic speech recognition. Acoustic sensors can be in a helmet or in a strap around the neck, chest, and wrist. Although the physiological sounds have high SNR, the acoustic sensor also responds to motion-induced artifacts that sometimes obscure meaningful physiology. A noise-canceling sensor array configuration helps remove motion noise by using two acoustic sensors on the front sides of the neck and 2 additional acoustic sensors on each wrist. The motion noise detected on all 4 sensors will be dissimilar and out of phase, yet the physiology on all 4 sensors is covariant. Pulse wave transit time between neck and wrist will indicate systolic blood pressure. Data from a firefighter experiment will be presented.