A Band-Aid Type Sensor for Wearable Physiological Monitoring

This paper reports on a band-aid type sensor that can simultaneously measure multiple physiological parameters with only one sensing element. The proposed sensor consists of a MEMS-based piezoresistive cantilever, a thin silicone tube whose inner pressure is measured by the cantilever. The whole sensor device is attached to a surgical tape, which allows the band-aid like attachment of the sensor to human skin to measure the vibration caused by the physiological parameters such as pulse wave, heart sound and respiration. Using the fabricated sensor device, we demonstrate two applications: the simultaneous measurements of pulse wave and respiration when attaching the sensor to the user's nose and the simultaneous measurements of heart sound and respiration using when attaching the sensor to the user's chest. We show that these the physiological parameters can be independently extracted from the cantilever output using low pass and high pass filters. The proposed sensor is useful for continuous health monitoring, which has become a great demand in the with/post COVID-19 era.