Wearable Health Monitoring System Based On Flexible Pressure Sensors

Monitoring the health data of the human body plays an important role in correcting bad habits and predicting some disease,which is very important for keeping a healthy life.There are so many health information of human body that can be measured out of body,making noninvasive monitoring of health signal possible.Traditional medical equipment is expensive and huge,which makes it not applicable for real-time monitoring of ordinary users.Although a variety of wearable devices have emerged in recent years to monitor human activity and physical condition,most of them remain on basic functions such as counting steps and heart rate measurements,failing to meet the growing demand for health monitoring.Among all body surface signals,the pressure signal is a common signal,such as wrist pulse and foot pressure distribution.But to accurately measure the pressure of the human body surface,there are still many challenges.Conventional measurement systems are too big to be suitable for wearable applications and require further miniaturization.Wrist pulse pressure signal is very weak and requires the pressure sensors to be of high sensitivity,low detection limit and fast response time to accurately measure the dynamic pulse pressure.The human foot pressure varies from a few kPa to hundreds kPa in walking state,which requires a wide pressure sensing range of the sensor and good repeatability.Traditional pressure sensors are mostly used for industrial production and scientific research,cannot meet the demands of wearable pressure monitoring system.Based on the consideration and analysis above,a wearable health monitoring system based on flexible capacitive pressure sensor is proposed,focusing on measuring wrist pulse and the foot pressure distribution.The system consists of low-power intelligent processor,capacitive sensor interface chip,low-power Bluetooth module,rechargeable Li-Ion battery and self-designed high-performance flexible pressure sensors.All the consideration were made to ensure low-power operation,getting a real-time data and send data to mobile devices.Due to the challenging demand of the pressure sensor of wrist pulse monitoring,a flexible pressure sensor with microstructured PDMS media was designed based on 3D print technology.The designed sensors featured high pressure sensitivity,fast response time,low detection limit and good durability.Based on the self-designed Applying the designed sensor to the pulse detection system,it can accurately measure the pulse pressure data and display it in real time on the mobile terminal APP of the customer.In this paper,the application of the pressure distribution of the foot pressure monitoring application of the laboratory developed porous flexible pressure sensor.The sensor has a very fast response time,with ultra-wide pressure detection range and good robustness,making it suitable for foot pressure distribution measurement applications.The foot pressure detection system realizes real-time display of human foot pressure,and step frequency and energy consumption can also be analyzed.