The Development Of A New Three-Channel Self-Pressurized Wrist Pulse-Taking Device

The wrist pulse, which is regarded as the important physiological phenomenon in the Tradition Chinese Medicine (TCM) clinical diagnosis, contains a wealth of information on human health. In terms of the Chinese pulse diagnosis, it mainly depends on the subjective judgment and experiences of the doctor. And this makes pulse diagnosis lack an objective basis and standard evaluation criteria. It is necessary to make objective and quantitative analysis on wrist pulse in order to improve the objectivity and accuracy of TCM diagnosis, reveal the formation mechanism for different pulse of human body.Based on the principle of pulse-taking, this paper designed and manufactured a new three-channel self-pressurized wrist pulse taking device to solve the problem that only the pulse waveform in Guan region of the wrist can be detected by most modern pulse acquisition systems. This new designed pulse-taking device applied micro force sensor to detect wrist pulse. Besides, the automatic compression module and the adjusting mechanism of three probe pulse sensors were designed to meet the demand of simulating the "three regions and nine pulse-takings" in TCM. This device applied STM32F107microchip, and the signal pre-processing circuit was designed according to the characteristics of acquired signal. The PC data processing software was programmed in C#to real-timely display wrist pulse waveforms and automatically store data into database. Following the signal acquisition, the PC data processing software processed the acquired pulse signal. Based on the principle of pulse taking, the features of single-cycle averaged pulse signal in both time and frequency domain was extracted and a classification method for classifying six classes pulse was proposed.As can be seen from experimental results, various technical indicators of the new three-channel self-pressurized wrist pulse taking device were met the design requirements, among which, the sensitivity was0.432mV/g-force, non-linear error was less than0.45%, accuracy error was less than0.46%and repeatability error was less than0.50%. In addition, with the cooperation of PC data processing software, this pulse taking device not only realized pulse signal acquisition in the way of "three regions and nine pulse-takings", but also realized searching the best pulse taking force and real-timely processing the pulse signal.