Flexible Pressure Sensor Array For Pulse Condition Taking

As the essence of Chinese traditional culture,the effectiveness and uniqueness of Chinese Traditional Medicine(TCM)in clinical diagnosis have been well verified for 2,000 years.Pulse diagnosis,as one of the four TCM diagnosis methods,has already shown its unique advantages in the long-term clinical practice.However,TCM physicians have no clear uniform standard for judging the pulse conditions during clinical treatment and the accuracy of the diagnosis is limited by the subjective feelings and experience of the doctors.In addition,the traditional pulse diagnosis method is difficult to integrate the obscure feelings with modern university data platforms.Therefore,there are still great challenges of the application of TCM in modernization or intelligent health care.In general,how to extract the obscure concept such as position,number,shape and trend and present them specifically and parametrically is the key factor for improving the accuracy of TCM pulse diagnosis and promoting the modernization of it.In order to extract the weak pulse signals and explore the relationship between real-time data and TCM pulse conditions,this paper designed a pressure sensor array for pulse detection based on the TCM pulse theory and wearable electronics.The performance of the sensor was researched comprehensively.The simultaneous pulse detection of three positions of "Cun","Guan" and "Chi" was realized and the obtained data was analyzed in detail by TCM theory.The main research contents of the thesis are as follows:(1)The characteristics of pulse distribution at the human radial artery were analyzed.Based on this research,the pulse movement was modeled mechanically,and the necessity of using pulse sensors to detect pulses was verified.Based on the characteristics of pulse distribution,the arrangement of the sensor units was designed to realize the multi-position and multi-dimensional pulse signals detection.A flexible ionogel based pressure sensor array was designed for pulse taking,and its detailed and reasonable preparation process was also formulated.The structure characterization and performance test scheme of the sensor were designed and a multi-channel data acquisition platform was also built for high precision real-time pulse signal acquisition and surface form presentation.(2)The performance of the ionogel based pressure sensor array was studied in detail,which shown not only wide detection range,high sensitivity and fast response speed,but also great biocompatible properties,self-healing properties and excellent consistency.The results indicated that the ionogel based sensor could meet the needs of sensor with high sensitivity,biocompatibility,stability and good consistency for pulse taking.The feasibility of its application in pulse detection was verified.(3)Based on the prepared flexible pressure sensor array and multi-channel data acquisition platform,series of pulse taking experiments were performed,and the collected pulse signals were also analyzed by the time domain analysis method.The different pulse conditions from different individuals and human states could be distinguished due to the different waveform characteristics.For the array signals,two kinds of pulse surface fitting methods were designed on the MATLAB platform,which could realize the fitting and presentation of the pulse surface and the 3-D pulse surface of a pulse position.The direct and specific presentation of pulse signals such as number,position,shape and trend have been realized by the study of pulse surface in the spatial dimension.The feasibility of surface analysis method of pulses condition has been verified by the comparison of the intensity distribution characteristics of different pulses conditions.