Wearable Sensor Platform to Monitor Physical Exertion Using Graphene Motion Tape
A primary concern during physically demanding activities is the risk of musculoskeletal injury. Sensing systems that monitor muscle activity can provide early warnings of physical fatigue, thereby improving the safety and effectiveness of labor. This work presents one such system in the form of a power-efficient, wearable sensing platform to infer distributed muscle exertion in real time. The system uses “Motion Tape,” which is a new type of skin-strain sensor fabricated by integrating graphene nanosheet thin films with commercially available kinesiology tape (K-Tape) that is then attached to human subjects. Here, Motion Tape is interfaced with the Urbano IoT sensor node, which includes an onboard microprocessor, wireless transceiver, analog-to-digital converter, input/output peripherals, and memory. In contrast to existing body sensor networks that require many sensors and nodes to monitor physical activity, the system presented herein captures distributed muscle engagement and skin strains over larger areas with fewer sensor nodes. This paper offers an overview of the system hardware design, the embedded software used to compress raw Motion Tape signals, and a preliminary validation on human subjects performing bicep curls.
