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Smart garment fabrics to enable non-contact opto-physiological monitoring

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journal contribution
posted on 2018-04-17, 08:03 authored by Dmitry Iakovlev, Sijung HuSijung Hu, Harnani Hassan, Vincent Dwyer, Roya Ashayer-Soltani, Chris Hunt, Jinsong Shen
Imaging photoplethysmography (iPPG) is an emerging technology used to assess microcirculation and cardiovascular signs by collecting backscattered light from illuminated tissue using optical imaging sensors. The aim of this study was to study how effective smart garment fabrics could be capturing physiological signs in a non-contact mode. The present work demonstrates a feasible approach of, instead of using conventional high-power illumination sources, integrating a grid of surface-mounted light emitting diodes (LEDs) into cotton fabric to spotlight the region of interest (ROI). The green and the red LEDs (525 and 660 nm) placed on a small cotton substrate were used to locally illuminate palm skin in a dual-wavelength iPPG setup, where the backscattered light is transmitted to a remote image sensor through the garment fabric. The results show that the illuminations from both wavelength LEDs can be used to extract heart rate (HR) reaching an accuracy of 90% compared to a contact PPG probe. Stretching the fabric over the skin surface alters the morphology of iPPG signals, demonstrating a significantly higher pulsatile amplitude in both channels of green and red illuminations. The skin compression by the fabric could be potentially utilised to enhance the penetration of illumination into cutaneous microvascular beds. The outcome could lead a new avenue of non-contact opto-physiological monitoring and assessment with functional garment fabrics.

Funding

The authors would like to thank Cotton Incorporated, USA, for financial support (Project contract No. 15-934) and the PhD research sponsorship of EPSRC-min CDT (2015-2018).

History

School

  • Mechanical, Electrical and Manufacturing Engineering

Published in

Biosensors

Citation

IAKOVLEV, D. ... et al, 2018. Smart garment fabrics to enable non-contact opto-physiological monitoring. Biosensors, 8 (2), 33.

Publisher

MDPI © The Authors

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/

Acceptance date

2018-03-26

Publication date

2018-03-29

Notes

This is an Open Access Article. It is published by MDPI under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY). Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

ISSN

2079-6374

Language

  • en