A Robust Wrist Pulse Acquisition System Based on Multisensor Collaboration and Signal Quality Assessment

The pulse sensed over radial artery on the wrist is regarded as an important physiological index in traditional Chinese medicine and Ayurvedic medicine. The computerized pulse diagnosis has been obtaining more and more attentions for its noninvasive character and its convenience in judging the health status of people. To acquire more accurate signals of pulse wave and contact pressure, several acquisition devices have been proposed. But most of them use a single type of sensor that cannot obtain both accurate dynamic pulse wave and static contact pressure. In this paper, we design a pressure sensor array comprising two different transducers to collect wrist pulse signal and contact pressure, synchronously. What is more, we propose a signal quality assessment frame by analyzing the types of abnormal signals and their causes. It can be used to improve the level of automatic collection and the performance of data analysis. The experimental results show that the proposed system can record more abundant information of the pulse signal, and the frame can identify different qualities of the signal as well. For computerized pulse diagnosis, the multichannel signals can achieve higher performance than single channel in distinguishing diseases from health after removing the abnormal signals.