An important bio signal that indicates the status of cardiovascular health and alerts concerning several cardiac conditions including high blood pressure and arteriosclerosis is a pulse wave. Conventional pulse wave measuring devices require the patient to wear a blood-pressure measuring cuff or stiff tong-shaped sensor and can mostly be performed at hospitals. They are also designed to measure signals only at a single location, making it difficult to accurately place them on the artery, leading to less precise measurements. All this is cumbersome.
So to ease the measurement and relevant diagnosis of cardiovascular issues, a research team from the Po hang University of Science and Technology in collaboration with the School of Energy and Chemical Engineering at National Institute of Science and Technology has developed a wearable sensor patch that’s thinner than a hair strand and can measure pulse wave signals with high precision.
Newly developed technology allows for at-home diagnosis of diseases that are usually performed only at hospitals, explained Professor Sung-Min Park He added, it can be used for medical applications such as pre-diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases and arterial catheter injections in daily life. To achieve this, the research team fabricated a pressure sensor that mimicked the human skin’s touch ability and enabled physical pulse waves for the patch, which consisted of 100 sensor pixels, to detect and locate the invisible arterial blood vessels in the wrist, and obtain a relevant two-dimensional (2D) pressure map. Moreover, the researchers took into consideration various age groups, genders and body sizes to design highly sensor patches.
A notable thing about this research was that the patch was printed using common printing, a technology that is bound to reduce costs and is claimed as the next-generation semiconductor manufacturing method. With this technology, wearable electronic devices can be made by simply printing conductive ink on a very thin substrate.
This study is significant in that it has demonstrated possible applications of printing to next-generation custom wearable devices
Wearable pressure sensors have demonstrated great potential in detecting pulse pressure waves on the skin for the noninvasive and continuous diagnosis of cardiac conditions. However, difficulties lie in positioning conventional single-point sensors on an invisible arterial line, thereby preventing the detection of adequate signal amplitude for accurate pulse wave analysis. Herein, we introduce the spatio-temporal measurements of arterial pulse waves using wearable active-matrix pressure sensors to obtain optimal pulse waveforms.
We fabricate thin-film transistor (TFT) arrays with high yield and uniformity using printing where array sizes can be customizable and integrate them with highly sensitive sheets. We maximize the pressure sensitivity and achieve low power consumption (101 NW) simultaneously by strategically modulating the TFT operation voltage. The sensor array creates a spatio-temporal pulse wave map on the wrist.
The map presents the positional dependence of pulse amplitudes, which allows the positioning of the arterial line to accurately extract the augmentation index, a parameter for assessing arterial stiffness. The device overcomes the positional inaccuracy of conventional single-point sensors, and therefore, it can be used for medical applications such as arterial catheter injection or the diagnosis of cardiovascular disease in daily life.
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