Arterial pulse waveform monitoring via a flexible PET-based microfluidic sensor

Abstract

For the purpose of cardiovascular system monitoring, this paper presents a flexible microfluidic sensor for measuring arterial pulse waveforms. Sitting on a flexible substrate, the core of the sensor is a polymer microstructure embedded with an electrolyte-enabled 5 × 1 resistive transducer array. As a time-varying load, a pulse signal deflects the microstructure and registers as a resistance change by the transducer at the site of the pulse. Radial, carotid and temporal pulse signals are all originally recorded as an absolute resistance signal by the sensor. Moreover, carotid pulse signals are measured on two subjects at-rest and post-exercise. A wavelet-based cascaded adaptive algorithm is written in Matlab to remove baseline drift (or motion artifacts) in a recorded pulse signal. The obtained pulse waveforms are consistent with the related findings in the literature. The sensor features low cost for mass production and easy use by an untrained individual.