A Study on Heart Rate Monitoring in Daily Life by Using a Surface-Type Sensor

Heart rate monitoring has huge potential in disease prevention, stroke prediction, and mental stress/workload assessment. Although most conventional heart rate monitoring systems are wearable devices, such devices may be obtrusive and disturb our daily life. This work proposes a new large, thin and flat/curved surface-type heart rate sensor. Building the proposed sensor into the surfaces of daily devices, such as a steering wheel or a computer mouse, allows daily heart rate to be monitored unobtrusively, without changing the users behavior. Experiments on subjects evaluated the heart rate monitoring performances of flat, curved, and mouse-embedded prototypes. The results confirm PPG measurement accuracies equivalent to those of the conventional point sensor.