Host: The Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers
Name : [in Japanese]
Date : June 02, 2018 - June 05, 2018
Heart rate is one of the biological rhythms and has fluctuating properties. By analyzing the fluctuation, we can obtain useful information on the health state. However, because heart rates are usually measured with electrodes, the measurement of instantaneous heart rate, which has equivalent information to heart rate variability, is also difficult to be conducted on a daily basis. To solve this problem, we are developing systems to detect instantaneous heart rate from output of a soft rubber-based tactile sensor. We may obtain instantaneous heart rate from the sensor output by using a signal processing technique called complex demodulation. To verify the accuracy of this method, we measured ECG and pressure time series from the tactile sensor simultaneously, and compared the detected instantaneous frequencies using cross-correlations. The results were quite promising. This shows the possibility that we may be able to develop a nonrestraint health monitoring system using a tactile sensor.