On July 20th, our company partnered with the Zhejiang Provincial Engineering Research Center for Intelligent Sensing of Life and Health at Jiaxing University, establishing an innovation base within our facility to research a project on the design of a heart rate and respiratory rate monitoring system for smart clothing.
The Zhejiang Provincial Engineering Research Center for Intelligent Sensing of Life and Health is led by Academician Lu Jun, the university’s president. The center will focus on intelligent sensing issues in the field of life and health, characterized by the cross-integration of electronic information and life and health technologies. Its direction is non-invasive, contactless, and remote sensing non-contact physiological feature acquisition and fusion applications. Through key technology breakthroughs and core product development, it aims to support the entire industrial chain from health data acquisition equipment to health data management and analysis, contributing to the development of public health.
The EFPI fiber optic acoustic sensor is currently the most sensitive type of acoustic sensor in the research field.
On June 27, 2021, the China National Space Administration released a series of real-time images of the Tianwen-1 Mars exploration mission’s landing and rover exploration, including the sound of the Zhurong rover leaving the landing platform. The Mars acoustic sensor that successfully detected this sound data was developed by Aerospace Rocket Company, a company located in the Beijing Economic-Technological Development Area, and possesses completely independent intellectual property rights.
The aerospace rocket company, fully considering the harsh environmental conditions of Mars, innovatively proposed a wide-temperature-range resistant sound sensor solution based on sensing principles. This solution enables omnidirectional sound detection on Mars surfaces at the base of a mast where heating protection is unavailable. The solution utilizes a fiber optic sound sensor, which, compared to traditional electret and capacitive sound sensors, features simpler material composition, lower transmission loss, and superior radiation and electromagnetic interference resistance. The Mars sound sensor connects to the optical demodulation unit inside the cabin via several meters of specialized optical fiber, thus avoiding the problems of traditional sound sensor pre-circuit being unable to withstand the low temperatures of space.
Our next steps involve two aspects: first, researching algorithms for real-time, effective, and low-cost extraction of vital signs information; and second, the hardware implementation of these algorithms.
This collaboration holds promise for the future development of more user-friendly smart clothing. For those who are not accustomed to using smart health bracelets, wearing this clothing can help monitor heart rate and respiratory rate, alerting them to potential health risks if these values exceed or fall below normal. This is especially beneficial for illiterate elderly individuals, significantly reducing the possibility of missed disease detection.
