An Analytical Model of Motion Artifacts in a Measured Arterial Pulse Signal—Part II: Tactile Sensors

This paper, the second of two parts, presents an analytical model of motion artifacts (MA) in measured pulse signals by a tactile sensor, which contains a deformable microstructure sitting on a substrate. While the tissue-contact-sensor (TCS) stack and the sensor are both treated as a 1DOF (degree-of-freedom) system, tissue-sensor contact joins their mass together to form a 1DOF system with springs and dampers on both sides. MA on the sensor substrate causes baseline drift and time-varying system parameters (TVSP) of the TCS stack simultaneously. An analytical model is developed to mathematically relate baseline drift and TVSP to a measured pulse signal. The numerical calculation is conducted in MATLAB. Baseline drift in a measured pulse signal is much lower than the actual MA in its measurement. As compared to baseline drift, TVSP generates relatively abrupt, small distortion (e.g., 0.2% variation in heart rate and <5% change in pulse amplitude), but it rides on each harmonic of the true pulse signal. Sensor design alters both the deviation of the amplitude and waveform of a measured pulse signal from the true pulse signal and the influence of MA on it.