Lola Gayle, STEAM Register
A newly-developed wearable acoustic sensor resembling a small bandage is capable of measuring vibrations in the human body, essentially allowing doctors to monitor human heart health.
The stretchable device, developed by researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder and Northwestern University, captures physiological sound signals from the body, and can even recognize spoken words.
What’s more, the sensor is extremely lightweight — weighing less than one-hundredth of an ounce — and can literally be placed on nearly any surface of the body.
“This device has a very low mass density and can be used for cardiovascular monitoring, speech recognition and human-machine interfaces in daily life,” said CU Boulder Assistant Professor Jae-Woong Jeong. “It is very comfortable and convenient — you can think of it as a tiny, wearable stethoscope.”
Jeong is one of three lead authors on a paper describing the sensor technology, which is published in Science Advances. The other two co-corresponding authors are Professors Yonggang Huang and John Rogers of Northwestern. Other CU Boulder study co-authors include Assistant Professor Jianliang Xiao and doctoral student Zhanan Zou of mechanical engineering and doctoral student Raza Qazi of electrical engineering. The study also included the Eulji University College of Medicine in Korea.
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“The thin, soft, skin-like characteristics of these advanced wearable devices provide unique capabilities for ‘listening in’ to the intrinsic sounds of vital organs of the body, including the lungs and heart, with important consequences in continuous monitoring of physiological health,” said Rogers, Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, Biomedical Engineering and Neurological Surgery.
For now, the system must be wired to an external data acquisition system, but Jeong said that it can easily be converted into a wireless device. Such sensors could be of use in remote, noisy places – including battlefields – producing quiet, high-quality cardiology or speech signals that can be read in real time at distant medical facilities.
“Using the data from these sensors, a doctor at a hospital far away from a patient would be able to make a fast, accurate diagnosis,” Jeong said.
Military personnel or civilians could also someday use the device to control robots, vehicles or drones via vocal cord vibration signals. The speech recognition capabilities of the sensor also have implications for improving communication for people suffering from speech impairments, Jeong said.
Additionally, the researchers demonstrated that vocal cord vibrations gathered when the device is on one’s throat can be used to control video games and other machines. During the study, a test subject was even able to control a Pac-Man game using vocal cord vibrations for the words “up,” “down,” “left” and “right.”
“While other skin electronics devices have been developed by researchers, what has not been demonstrated before is the mechanical-acoustic coupling of our device to the body through the skin,” Jeong said. “Our goal is to make this device practical enough to use in our daily lives.”
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