| 总结: | Call bell systems play an important role for patients and nurse interaction in hospitals
and at homes. Conventionally, when in danger or in need, a patient would press a call
bell button for assistance. However, a large percentage of hospitalized patients are unable
to use such device due to hand weakness or the device is unreachable to the patient when
positioned away, especially for patients with tetraplegia. This problem has motivated the
development of a fabric-based multi-array pressure sensor as a call bell garment that
works by detecting the pressure pattern on a pillow surface where the patient is lying
down. In this study, we utilized off-the-shelf materials to form: i) a fabric-based multiarray
pressure sensor system, ii) an acquisition circuit along with interface and signal
processing algorithms to acquire and interpret the sensor data. To ensure the functionality
of the proposed fabric-based pressure sensor, a colour-coded mesh plot was developed to
visualise the sensor data. The reliability of the sensor was tested using a portable load
cell. Pressure profile of the proposed multi-array fabric-based pressure sensor shows
comparable profile to that of the commercialized pressure sensor. The main advantage of
the proposed sensor is that it is flexible and adaptable making it suitable to be interfaced
with the human body. A case study was performed on an able-bodied person and two
tetraplegic patients who used the sensor as the pillow cover. Findings from this case study
have demonstrated the ability to map the force on the surface of the pillow and
subsequently the location of the force applied with 71% accuracy and 70% sensitivity.
This feature makes it suitable to detect the pattern of head movement and hence a call bell
for patients with special needs.
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