A Flexible and Wearable Human Stress Monitoring Patch

Abstract

A human stress monitoring patch integrates three sensors of skin temperature, skin conductance, and pulsewave in the size of stamp (25 mm x 15 mm x 72 mu m) in order to enhance wearing comfort with small skin contact area and high flexibility. The skin contact area is minimized through the invention of an integrated multi-layer structure and the associated microfabrication process; thus being reduced to 1/125 of that of the conventional single-layer multiple sensors. The patch flexibility is increased mainly by the development of flexible pulsewave sensor, made of a flexible piezoelectric membrane supported by a perforated polyimide membrane. In the human physiological range, the fabricated stress patch measures skin temperature with the sensitivity of 0.31 Omega/degrees C, skin conductance with the sensitivity of 0.28 mu V/0.02 mu S, and pulse wave with the response time of 70 msec. The skin-attachable stress patch, capable to detect multimodal bio-signals, shows potential for application to wearable emotion monitoring