During pulse signal collection, width information of pulse waves is essential for the diagnosis of disease. However, currently used measuring instruments can only detect the amplitude while can’t acquire the width information. This paper proposed a novel wrist pulse signal acquisition system, which could realize simultaneous measurements of the width and amplitude of dynamic pulse waves under different static forces. A tailor-packaged micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS) sensor array was employed to collect pulse signals, a conditioning circuit was designed to process the signals, and a customized algorithm was developed to compute the width. Experiments were carried out to validate the accuracy of the sensor array and system effectiveness. The results showed the system could acquire not only the amplitude of pulse wave but also the width of it. The system provided more information about pulse waves, which could help doctors make the diagnosis.

Continuous monitoring of pulse waves plays a significant role in reflecting physical conditions and disease diagnosis. However, the current collection equipment cannot simultaneously achieve wearable and continuous monitoring under varying pressure and provide personalized pulse wave monitoring targeted different human bodies. To solve the above problems, this paper proposed a novel wearable and real-time pulse wave monitoring system based on a novel flexible compound sensor. Firstly, a custom-packaged pressure sensor, a signal stabilization structure, and a micro pressurization system make up the flexible compound sensor to complete the stable acquisition of pulse wave signals under continuously varying pressure. Secondly, a real-time algorithm completes the analysis of the trend of the pulse wave peak, which can quickly and accurately locate the best pulse wave for different individuals. Finally, the experimental results show that the wearable system can both realize continuous monitoring and reflecting trend differences and quickly locate the best pulse wave for different individuals with the 95% accuracy. The weight of the whole system is only 52.775 g, the working current is 46 mA, and the power consumption is 160 mW. Its small size and low power consumption meet wearable and portable scenarios, which has significant research value and commercialization prospects.

The respiratory signal is a critical index of cardiopulmonary function. In this paper, we implement the polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) sensor to collect the data of pulse waves and reference respiration signals. The correlations between the major feature values and breaths are investigated and presented. As a result, several feature values exhibit relatively good correlations with reference respiratory amplitude. The improvements of Kalman Filter for the respiratory signals extracted from feature value variances are also introduced. Moreover, we display the comparisons with low-pass filtering, Wavelet filtering, and ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD) method. Using the method of identifying error breaths, the error rate of the new method is about 4:146%. The new method is feasible for real-time applications at quiet state.

In pulse waveform classification, the convolution neural network (CNN) shows excellent performance. However, due to its numerous parameters and intensive computation, it is challenging to deploy a CNN model to low-power devices. To solve this problem, we implement a CNN accelerator based on a field-programmable gate array (FPGA), which can accurately and quickly infer the waveform category. By designing the structure of CNN, we significantly reduce its parameters on the premise of high accuracy. Then the CNN is realized on FPGA and optimized by a variety of memory access optimization methods. Experimental results show that our customized CNN has high accuracy and fewer parameters, and the accelerator costs only 0.714 W under a working frequency of 100 MHz, which proves that our proposed solution is feasible. Furthermore, the accelerator classifies the pulse waveform in real time, which could help doctors make the diagnosis.

Micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS) pressure sensors play a significant role in pulse wave acquisition. However, existing MEMS pulse pressure sensors bound with a flexible substrate by gold wire are vulnerable to crush fractures, leading to sensor failure. Additionally, establishing an effective mapping between the array sensor signal and pulse width remains a challenge. To solve the above problems, we propose a 24-channel pulse signal acquisition system based on a novel MEMS pressure sensor with a through-silicon-via (TSV) structure, which connects directly to a flexible substrate without gold wire bonding. Firstly, based on the MEMS sensor, we designed a 24-channel pressure sensor flexible array to collect the pulse waves and static pressure. Secondly, we developed a customized pulse preprocessing chip to process the signals. Finally, we built an algorithm to reconstruct the three-dimensional pulse wave from the array signal and calculate the pulse width. The experiments verify the high sensitivity and effectiveness of the sensor array. In particular, the measurement results of pulse width are highly positively correlated with those obtained via infrared images. The small-size sensor and custom-designed acquisition chip meet the needs of wearability and portability, meaning that it has significant research value and commercial prospects.