Non-Invasive Flexible Electro-Mechanical Sensors for Human Respiratory Monitoring and Chronic Disease Management

As one of the important physiological signals of the human body, changes in respiration can provide an important reference for human health and is an early warning signal for some chronic respiratory diseases on heart or lung diseases. Usually, doctors combine such changes with electrocardiograph (ECG), electroencephalograph (EEG), electromyography (EMG), and electrooculogram (EOG) results of the patient to make a comprehensive analysis and judgment of the condition. Traditional respiratory monitoring methods have the limitation that portability and accuracy cannot be balanced; while the wearable respiratory monitoring sensors have come into the public's view due to their excellent performances, such as light weight, fast response, not interfering with the subject's daily movement, and maintaining excellent measurement accuracy, which provide more possibilities for the improvement of the performances of the wearable devices applied in the early stage of chronic diseases. This article primarily introduces flexible electro-mechanical sensors for monitoring human respiratory rate based on different mechanisms, materials, fabrications, and provides prospects for their application in medical field. image