Flexible piezoelectric sensor for pregnant recognition based on the pulse-taking procedure in traditional Chinese medicine

Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is an experienced-based discipline and plays an important role in the current medical system. Digitalizing key features is the best way to con-duct an in-depth analysis of TCM. However, due to its complex generation mechanism, the crucial pulse-taking procedure is hard to be digitalized and analyzed. This article fabricated a flexible piezoelectric sensor to gather data for the pulse-taking procedure. The sensitivity of the proposed flexible sensor reached 0.34 V/kPa, so we adopted peripheral circuits to make its output signals stay in a reasonable range (± 0.5 V) for convenient data collection. We used the sensor to recognize whether a woman is pregnant since it has solid golden standards. The pulse signal was fused via mapping the signal spectrogram into a 3-dimension tensor. The fused matrix was then processed by GoogleNet and reached a 90.48% correction rate. This result shows that the pulse condition has statistical differences, which solidified the objectivity of pulse diagnosis and escalated the TCM's digitalization level. © 2023 The Authors. Engineering Reports published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.