Continuous Vital Monitoring During Sleep and Light Activity Using Carbon-Black Elastomer Sensors

Sensors

GaetanoD. Gargiulo¹  PaulP. Breen²  Titus Jayarathna² 

[1] School of Engineering, Western Sydney University, Penrith, NSW 2751, Australia;The MARCS Institute, Western Sydney University, Milperra, NSW 2560, Australia;

关键词: vital parameter monitoring;    sleep monitoring;    conductive polymer;    home sleep test;    continuous respiratory monitoring;   

DOI  :  10.3390/s20061583

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

The comfortable, continuous monitoring of vital parameters is still a challenge. The long-term measurement of respiration and cardiovascular signals is required to diagnose cardiovascular and respiratory diseases. Similarly, sleep quality assessment and the recovery period following acute treatments require long-term vital parameter datalogging. To address these requirements, we have developed “VitalCore”, a wearable continuous vital parameter monitoring device in the form of a T-shirt targeting the uninterrupted monitoring of respiration, pulse, and actigraphy. VitalCore uses polymer-based stretchable resistive bands as the primary sensor to capture breathing and pulse patterns from chest expansion. The carbon black-impregnated polymer is implemented in a U-shaped configuration and attached to the T-shirt with “interfacing” material along with the accompanying electronics. In this paper, VitalCore is bench tested and compared to gold standard respiration and pulse measurements to verify its functionality and further to assess the quality of data captured during sleep and during light exercise (walking). We show that these polymer-based sensors could identify respiratory peaks with a sensitivity of 99.44%, precision of 96.23%, and false-negative rate of 0.557% during sleep. We also show that this T-shirt configuration allows the wearer to sleep in all sleeping positions with a negligible difference of data quality. The device was also able to capture breathing during gait with 88.9−100% accuracy in respiratory peak detection.

【 授权许可】

Unknown