No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

There is a growing demand for daily heart rate (HR) monitoring in the fields of healthcare, fitness, activity recognition, and entertainment. Although various HR monitoring systems have been proposed, most of these employ a wearable device, which may be a burden and disturb one's daily living.To achieve the goal of pervasive HR monitoring in our daily living, we present the HR monitoring method through the surface of a drinkware. The proposed method employs the surface of a drinkware as a broad sensing region, by expanding the principal of a basic photo-based HR sensor. The sensing surface works even with a curved shape, and it can be applied on various types of drinkwares. This approach enables unobtrusive HR monitoring during the beverage consumption. As a prototype, we implemented the proposed method on an ordinary transparent tumbler, and evaluated its HR monitoring performance.

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.