Radial Arterial Pulse Simulation System in Three Modalities for Teaching Purposes According to Traditional Chinese Medicine

The diagnosis of the radial arterial pulse is used in Traditional Chinese Medicine as a clinical procedure that allows knowing the state of health of a person or organ holistically based on the specialist's sensitivity, knowledge, and experience. To perform this task, people interested in practicing pulsology require extensive training. The present work consists of a simulator development of the blood pulse of the radial artery in three complementary modalities. According to the practice of traditional Chinese medicine, this proposal allows students and medical doctors to become familiar with the pulse by feeling, observing, and listening, associating the information with medical diagnoses. For these purposes, the radial arterial pulse signal is applied to an electromechanical actuator for the pressure modality, a display for graph presentation, and the reproduction as audio derived from the harmonics generated by a speaker. In this way, those students and specialists interested in traditional Chinese medicine could identify the blood pulse parameters in less time than those using only pressure-based systems. Due to the lack of databases related to radial pulse signals, pulse graphic models reported were quantified and concatenated to generate and reproduce the pulse signals continuously. The system was designed around the STM32F4Discovery development card for quantization, digitizing, and reproducing the pulse signal through algorithms implemented in the programming platform of the card processor. The pulse signal is applied to a linear voice coil motor, a speaker as a transducer, and a graphic display. The proposal, through three modalities, contributes to studies of pulse signals for a possible reduction of training time in the learning process.