Respiration rate and volume measurements using wearable strain sensors.

Current methods for continuous respiration monitoring such as respiratory inductive or optoelectronic plethysmography are limited to clinical or research settings; most wearable systems reported only measures respiration rate. Here we introduce a wearable sensor capable of simultaneously measuring both respiration rate and volume with high fidelity. Our disposable respiration sensor with a Band-Aid© like formfactor can measure both respiration rate and volume by simply measuring the local strain of the ribcage and abdomen during breathing. We demonstrate that both metrics are highly correlated to measurements from a medical grade continuous spirometer on participants at rest. Additionally, we also show that the system is capable of detecting respiration under various ambulatory conditions. Because these low-powered piezo-resistive sensors can be integrated with wireless Bluetooth units, they can be useful in monitoring patients with chronic respiratory diseases in everyday settings

Wearable Biosensor: How to improve the efficacy in data transmission in respiratory monitoring system?

Respiratory rate measurement is important under different types of health issues. The need for technological developments for measuring respiratory rate has become imperative for healthcare professionals. The paper presents an approach to respiratory monitoring, with the aim to improve the accuracy and efficacy of the data monitored. We use multiple types of sensors on various locations on the body to continuously transmit real-time data, which is  rocessed to calculate the respiration rate. Variations in the respiration rate will help us identify the current health condition of the patient also for diagnosis and further medical treatment. The software tools such as Keil μVision IDE, Mbed Studio IDE, Energia IDE are used to compile and build the system architecture and display information. EasyEDA is used to provide pin map details and complete architecture information

Flexible Materials And Applications For Wearable Sensors

This literature review aimed to address the limitations of rigid wearable sensors in the medical community by investigating the development of flexible materials for remote health monitoring. A keyword search was conducted on Google Scholar, PubMed, and the Jerry Falwell Library, which yielded 9,102 articles. After applying filtering techniques, the results were narrowed down to 21 articles, which were categorized into Present Market Conditions, Flexible Materials for Medical Use, Applications for Wearable Sensors, and Potential Use Cases. Discussions were held on prominent materials such as substrate, nanocomposite, and liquid metal materials, exploring their potential applications for chemical and physical sensing, as well as power supply considerations for these devices. The study concluded with potential use cases, such as athletic performance metrics, military personnel monitoring, and patients with chronic conditions. The research found that further exploration in the field of soft, textile-based micro batteries is necessary to overcome the current limitations of wearable sensors. The study provides valuable insights into the future of wearable sensors in the medical community and highlights the need for more research into the use of flexible materials

Updated Perspectives on the Role of Biomechanics in COPD: Considerations for the Clinician

Patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) demonstrate extra-pulmonary functional decline such as an increased prevalence of falls. Biomechanics offers insight into functional decline by examining mechanics of abnormal movement patterns. This review discusses biomechanics of functional outcomes, muscle mechanics, and breathing mechanics in patients with COPD as well as future directions and clinical perspectives. Patients with COPD demonstrate changes in their postural sway during quiet standing compared to controls, and these deficits are exacerbated when sensory information (eg, eyes closed) is manipulated. If standing balance is disrupted with a perturbation, patients with COPD are slower to return to baseline and their muscle activity is differential from controls. When walking, patients with COPD appear to adopt a gait pattern that may increase stability (eg, shorter and wider steps, decreased gait speed) in addition to altered gait variability. Biomechanical muscle mechanics (ie, tension, extensibility, elasticity, and irritability) alterations with COPD are not well documented, with relatively few articles investigating these properties. On the other hand, dyssynchronous motion of the abdomen and rib cage while breathing is well documented in patients with COPD. Newer biomechanical technologies have allowed for estimation of regional, compartmental, lung volumes during activity such as exercise, as well as respiratory muscle activation during breathing. Future directions of biomechanical analyses in COPD are trending toward wearable sensors, big data, and cloud computing. Each of these offers unique opportunities as well as challenges. Advanced analytics of sensor data can offer insight into the health of a system by quantifying complexity or fluctuations in patterns of movement, as healthy systems demonstrate flexibility and are thus adaptable to changing conditions. Biomechanics may offer clinical utility in prediction of 30-day readmissions, identifying disease severity, and patient monitoring. Biomechanics is complementary to other assessments, capturing what patients do, as well as their capability

Updates of Wearing Devices (WDs) In Healthcare, And Disease Monitoring

 With the rising pervasiveness of growing populace, aging and chronic illnesses consistently rising medical services costs, the health care system is going through a crucial change from the conventional hospital focused system to an individual-focused system. Since the twentieth century, wearable sensors are becoming widespread in medical care and biomedical monitoring systems, engaging consistent estimation of biomarkers for checking of the diseased condition and wellbeing, clinical diagnostics and assessment in biological fluids like saliva, blood, and sweat. Recently, the improvements have been centered around electrochemical and optical biosensors, alongside advances with the non-invasive monitoring of biomarkers, bacteria and hormones, etc. Wearable devices have created with a mix of multiplexed biosensing, microfluidic testing and transport frameworks incorporated with flexible materials and body connections for additional created wear ability and effortlessness. These wearables hold guarantee and are fit for a higher understanding of the relationships between analyte focuses inside the blood or non-invasive biofluids and feedback to the patient, which is fundamentally significant in ideal finding, therapy, and control of diseases. In any case, cohort validation studies and execution assessment of wearable biosensors are expected to support their clinical acceptance. In the current review, we discussed the significance, highlights, types of wearables, difficulties and utilizations of wearable devices for biological fluids for the prevention of diseased conditions and real time monitoring of human wellbeing. In this, we sum up the different wearable devices that are developed for health care monitoring and their future potential has been discussed in detail

Smart bandage with wireless strain and temperature sensors and battery-less NFC tag

This paper presents a smart bandage with wireless strain and temperature sensors and a battery-less Near Field Communication tag. Both sensors are based on conductive poly (3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) polystyrene sulfonate (PEDOT:PSS) polymer. The highly sensitive strain sensor consists of a microfluidic channel filled with PEDOT:PSS in Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) substrate. The strain sensor shows 3 order ( 1250) increase in the resistance for 10% strain and considerably high gauge factor of 12500. The sensor was tested for 30% strain, which is more than typical stretching of human skin or body parts such as chest expansion during respiration. The strain sensor was also tested for different bending and the electrical resolution was 150% per degree of free bending and 12k% per percentage of stretching. The resistive temperature sensor, fabricated on a Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC) substrate, showed a 60% decrease in resistance when the temperature changed from 25.C to 85.C and a sensitivity of 1% per.C. As a proof of concept, the sensors and NFC tag were integrated on wound dressing to obtain wearable systems with smart bandage form-factor. The sensors can be operated and read from distance of 25 mm with a user-friendly smartphone application developed for powering the system as well as real-time acquisition of sensors data. Finally, we demonstrate the potential use of smart bandage in healthcare applications such as assessment of wound status or respiratory diseases such as asthma and COVID-19, where monitoring via wearable strain (e.g., respiratory volume) and temperature sensors is critical

Highly Sensitive Soft Foam Sensors for Wearable Applications

Due to people’s increasing desire for body health monitoring, the needs of knowing humans’ body parameters and transferring them to analyzable and understandable signals become increasingly attractive and significant. The present body-sign measurement devices are still bulky medical devices used in settings such as clinics or hospitals, which are accurate, but expensive and cannot achieve the personalization of usage targets and the monitoring of real-time body parameters. Many commercial wearable devices can provide some of the body indexes, such as the smartwatch providing the pulse/heartbeat information, but cannot give accurate and reliable data, and the data could be influenced by the user’s movement and the loose wearing habit, either. In this way, developing next-generation wearable devices combining good wearable experience and accuracy is gathering increasing attention. The aim of this study is to develop a high-performance pressure/strain sensor with the requirements of comfortable to wear, and having great electromechanical behaviour to convert the physiological signal to an analyzable signal

Continuous vital monitoring during sleep and light activity using carbon-black elastomer sensors

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

Human Health Engineering Volume II

In this Special Issue on “Human Health Engineering Volume II”, we invited submissions exploring recent contributions to the field of human health engineering, i.e., technology for monitoring the physical or mental health status of individuals in a variety of applications. Contributions could focus on sensors, wearable hardware, algorithms, or integrated monitoring systems. We organized the different papers according to their contributions to the main parts of the monitoring and control engineering scheme applied to human health applications, namely papers focusing on measuring/sensing physiological variables, papers highlighting health-monitoring applications, and examples of control and process management applications for human health. In comparison to biomedical engineering, we envision that the field of human health engineering will also cover applications for healthy humans (e.g., sports, sleep, and stress), and thus not only contribute to the development of technology for curing patients or supporting chronically ill people, but also to more general disease prevention and optimization of human well-being

New Electrochemical Sensors for Decentralized Analysis

Nous sensors electroquímics per a analisis decentralitzats és una tesis que emmarca diferents aspectes del desenvolupament de sensors potenciomètrics, des de la seva fabricació, el diseny adequat, i finalment, la seva aplicabilitat en escenaris reals. En el context actual, l'evolució de la tecnologia, especialment l'aparició a nivell global d'internet, i la disponibilitat d'aquesta a baix cost han permès la creació d'eines que ens permeten connectar el món físic i, en el cas d'aquesta tesis, el món químic a la xarxa. Aquesta connexió aporta un nou grau dins l'escala de valor per a la societat actual. Concretament, aquesta aportació tecnològica va adreçada a superar els nous reptes de l'actualitat, com poden ser la sostenibilitat del sistema sanitari a causa de l'embelliment de la societat, el control medioambiental, així com també mantenir la seguretat per a la societat del benestar del futur. Així doncs, aquesta tesis presenta solucions efectives per al desenvolupament d'eines de captació d'informació que serviràn per nudrir a la societat de major coneixement. Conseqüentment, produint nous negocis al voltant, de la fabricació, processament i creació de valor entorn a aquestes dades. La recerca i desenvolupament de sensors potenciomètrics integrats a la roba per detectar els nivells d'electròlits i sensors senzills de paper per a la determinació de biomolècules, com la glucosa, són alguns dels objectius aconseguits en aquesta tesis. A més a més, sensors integrats en globus permeten l'estudi de les seves propietats mecàniques i electroquímiques, així com també, aporten noves solucions a problemes reals. Totes aquestes aplicacions serveixen de portals de captació d'informació química cap a la integració dins la nova societat de la informació.Nuevos sensores electroquímicos para analisis decentralizados es una tesis que enmarca diferentes aspectos del desarrollo de sensores potenciométricos, desde su fabricación, el diseño adecuado, i finalmente, su aplicabilidad en escenarios reales. En el contexto actual, la evolución de la tecnología, especialmente la aparición a nivel global de internet, y la disponibilidad de esta a bajo coste han permitido la creación de herramientas que nos permiten conectar el mundo físico y, en el caso de esta tesis, el mundo químico a la red. Esta conexión aporta un nuevo grado dentro la escala de valor para la sociedad actual. Concretamente, esta aportación tecnológica va dirigida a superar los nuevos retos de la actualidad, como pueden ser la sostenibilidad del sistema sanitario a causa del envejecimiento de la poblacion, el control medioambiental, así como también mantener la seguridad para la sociedad del bienestar del futuro. Entonces, esta tesis presenta soluciones efectivas para el desarrollo de herramientas de captación de información que servirán para nutrir a la sociedad de un mayor conocimiento. Por consiguiente, produciendo nuevos negocios alrededor, de la fabricación, procesado i creación de valor en los datos obtenidos. La investigación y desarrollo de sensores potenciométricos integrados en la ropa para detectar los niveles de electrolitos y sensores simples en papel para la determinación de biomoléculas, como la glucosa, son algunos de los objetivos conseguidos en esta tesis. Además, sensores integrados en globos permiten el estudio de sus propiedades mecánicas y electroquímicas, así como, aportando nuevas soluciones a problemas reales. Todas estas aplicaciones sirven de portales de captación de información química hacia la integración dentro de la nueva sociedad de la información.ew Electrochemical Sensors for Decentralized Analysis is a thesis that wisely discuss the developments of potentiometric sensors, from the fabrication step, the use of a suitable design, to the applicability in real scenarios. Nowadays, the evolution of technology, specially the creation of the global internet network, and the low-cost availability of such technology have allowed the development of tools that connect the physical world and, addressed in this thesis, the chemical world into the network. This connection adds a new level in the value chain for the present society. Precisely, this technology approach is focus on circumvent new present challenges of society. For instance, sustainability of the healthcare system caused by the population aging, environmental monitoring, as well as, keep security and safety to the welfare of society of the future. Therefore, this thesis presents successful solutions for the development of tools to gather chemical information. This information will nurture society with high-value knowledge. Accordingly, new business development from, sensing products, data treatment and information management are going to be created. Research and development of potentiometric sensors integrated into garments for electrolyte detection and simple sensors built in paper for biomolecules determination, such as glucose, and liquid monitoring, such as sweat, are some of the accomplished objectives from this thesis. Furthermore, balloon-embedded sensors allow the study of the mechanical and electrochemical properties of the electrodes, as well as, contributing with new solutions to real problems. All the applications developed in this thesis are utilized as gateways for chemical information acquisition towards the integration into the new information society