Optimal Design of a New Strain-Type Sensor for Cuff-Less Blood Pressure Measurement via Finite Element Modeling and Taguchi Method

A new cuff-less blood pressure (BP) sensor is designed and optimized in this paper. This BP sensor is in a shape of a circular disc of polymer enclosing an electrode. As the sensor is attached to the wrist artery, the dynamic bending of the sensor due to small artery pulsation induces variation in the electrode strain, and then, its resistance varies. With adequate amplification to sense resistance variation, the pulsation signals can be successfully obtained. With the measured pulsation representing well the blood volume pulsation (BVP), BP can be estimated next via the pulse wave velocity (PWV) theory. Effort is dedicated by this paper to optimize the sizes and geometry of the proposed sensor to maximize the electrode curvature change for largest measured signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) possible, which maximizes the accuracy of BP estimation. To this end, the optimization via the finite element modeling and the Taguchi method is carried out. In results, the optimal sizes in height/radius, fillet, hardness, and the electrode position of the polymer disc are successfully derived, which are in the height of 2 mm, the radius of 6mm, the distance between the planar electrode and the bottom surface of sensor being 1 mm, the hardness of the encapsulating polymer being 25 in shore A hardness, and the fillets at the bottom of the polymer disc being 1 mm in radii. BP is measured for 59 subjects. The resulted errors are 3.60 ± 5.40 mmHg (mean difference ± standard deviation) and 1.15 ± 1.63 mmHg for SBP and DBP, respectively. The correlations are 0.8787 and 0.9648, demonstrating well the favorable performance of the developed sensor.