Performing real-time monitoring for human vital signs during sleep at home is of vital importance to achieve timely detection and rescue. However, the existing smart equipment for monitoring human vital signs suffers the drawbacks of high complexity, high cost, and intrusiveness, or low accuracy. Thus, it is of great need to develop a simplified, nonintrusive, comfortable and low cost real-time monitoring system during sleep. In this study, a novel intelligent pillow was developed based on a low-cost piezoelectric ceramic sensor. It was manufactured by locating a smart system (consisting of a sensing unit i.e. a piezoelectric ceramic sensor, a data processing unit and a GPRS communication module) in the cavity of the pillow made of shape memory foam. The sampling frequency of the intelligent pillow was set at 1000 Hz to capture the signals more accurately, and vital signs including heart rate, respiratory rate and body movement were derived through series of well established algorithms, which were sent to the user’s app. Validation experimental results demonstrate that high heart-rate detection accuracy (i.e. 99.18%) was achieved in using the intelligent pillow. Besides, human tests were conducted by detecting vital signs of six elder participants at their home, and results showed that the detected vital signs may well predicate their health conditions. In addition, no contact discomfort was reported by the participants. With further studies in terms of validity of the intelligent pillow and large-scale human trials, the proposed intelligent pillow was expected to play an important role in daily sleep monitoring.

中文翻译：

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基于压电陶瓷传感器的智能枕头非侵入式生命体征监测

在家中对人体生命体征进行实时监测，对于实现及时发现和抢救至关重要。然而，现有的用于监测人体生命体征的智能设备存在复杂度高、成本高、侵入性强或准确度低的缺点。因此，非常需要开发一种简化的、非侵入性的、舒适的、低成本的睡眠实时监测系统。在这项研究中，基于低成本压电陶瓷传感器开发了一种新型智能枕头。它是通过将智能系统（由传感单元即压电陶瓷传感器、数据处理单元和 GPRS 通信模块组成）放置在由形状记忆泡沫制成的枕头空腔中制成的。智能枕头的采样频率设置为 1000 Hz，以更准确地捕获信号，并通过一系列完善的算法得出包括心率、呼吸频率和身体运动在内的生命体征，并将其发送到用户的应用程序。验证实验结果表明，使用智能枕头达到了较高的心率检测准确率（即99.18%）。此外，通过在家中检测六名老年人的生命体征进行人体测试，结果表明检测到的生命体征可以很好地预测他们的健康状况。此外，参与者没有报告任何接触不适。随着智能枕头有效性的进一步研究和大规模人体试验，