Stretchy Heart Monitor Tattoo Measures Electrical, Mechanical Body Signals
Electrocardiograph and seismocardiograph readings can be taken simultaneously by an e-tattoo, according to the University of Texas at Austin – seismocardiography (SCG) is a measure of chest vibrations associated with heartbeats.
“We can get much greater insight into heart health by the synchronous collection of data from both sources,” said Austin engineer Nanshu Lu.
The active part is a serpentine mesh of 28µm‐thick piezoelectric polymer polyvinylidene fluoride.
Integrating the movement sensor with a pair of soft gold electrodes on a single e‐tattoo forms a sensor capable of synchronous ECG and SCG measurement, and various cardiac time intervals can be extracted including systolic time interval, according to the paper ‘A chest‐laminated ultrathin and stretchable e‐tattoo for the measurement of electrocardiogram, seismocardiogram, and cardiac time intervals‘, published in Advanced Science.
It might also be possible to estimate blood pressure from the information available, said the university. “We found that among those time intervals, the systolic time interval (STI) has a strong negative correlation with blood pressure (BP). This prompted us to estimate BP beat‐to‐beat using the EMAC e‐tattoo,” according to the paper.
Piezoelectric sensors can suffer from motion artifacts, which could be reduced by using a adjacent pair of tattoos..
