Experimental investigation on the suitability of flexible pressure sensor for wrist pulse measurement

Pulse examination at the radial artery of the wrist is a most apparent diagnosis technique. Wrist pulse carries rich information about the cardiovascular system of human body. An investigation is made here to suggest suitable flexible type of thin film pressure sensor to measure the wrist pulse as per Ayurvedic medicine system. Primary objective of this work is to suggest a sensor which exhibits optimum spatial features and SNR values. Force Sensing Resistor (FSR), piezoresistive and piezoelectric thin film sensors are considered under this study. Piezoelectric sensor shows good performance in the quality of the pulse with 22 dB SNR. Further experimentation is conducted to find out transmissivity, repeatability and susceptibility to motion artifact. Trasnsmissivities of 0.91, 0.68 and 0.64 are obtained for piezoelectric, piezoresistive and FSR sensors respectively. Piezoresistive and FSR show repeatability error of ±8% and ± 7% while measuring pulse amplitude under standard force. Noise due to motion artifact for each type of sensors are recorded and compared with the standard Gaussian distribution function with the help of histogram. Collectively, piezoelectric sensor exhibits good spatial features, high transmissivity and comparatively low susceptibility to motion artifact.