A thermal peripheral blood flowmeter with contact force compensation

This paper presents a thermal peripheral blood flowmeter where a force sensor is integrated to compensate the blood flow measurement. Since blood flow is highly sensitive to the contact force between the sensor and skin, previous blood flowmeters needed to be fixed on the skin with a constant contact force. We integrate a force sensor with a thermal blood flowmeter to measure both blood flow and contact force simultaneously for force-compensated blood flow measurement. The blood flowmeter presented here is composed of a resistance temperature detector and a piezoresistive force sensor and was fabricated by surface and bulk micromachining techniques. In the experimental measurement, the blood flow linearly decreased with the contact force at the rate of 31.7% N-1. By using the measured compensation coefficient, the device showed a constant blood flow with the maximum difference of 6.4% over the contact force variation of 1-3 N, and otherwise showed the maximum difference of 75.0%. The present device is suitable for applications with portable biomedical instrumentation or air-conditioning systems for the estimation of human thermoregulation status.