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Forcecardiography: a novel technique to measure heart mechanical vibrations onto the chest wall

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Background and motivation Electrocardiography (ECG) is undoubtedly the most used technique to analyse and monitor the heart and, indeed, it is currently used to diagnose many different cardiac pathologies. However, ECG only provides information about the electrical behaviour of the heart , so it cannot be used to analyse also the corresponding mechanical behaviour, thus limiting the scope of cardiac monitoring. Since the second half of the XIX century, several different techniques have been proposed to gather information on cardiac mechanics. However, the cumbersome instrumentation involved, as well as the lack of reliable annotation standards, made them almost disappear from scientific research, in favour of more appealing techniques, such as  echocardiography. Thanks to the availability of modern, small and lightweight sensors, some of these techniques, i.e. Ballistocardiography ( BCG ) and Seismocardiography ( SCG ) , came back in vogue as a mean for unobtrusive, long-term ...
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A piezoresistive sensor to measure muscle contraction and mechanomyography

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EMG-based applications traditionally suffered from many drawbacks, mainly related to the stability of skin-electrodes contact during long-term monitoring. Dry electrodes promised to solve part of these issues, but, in the past decades, their use provided minimal improvements. The ultimate frontier of EMG-based applications relies on the implementation of fully electrodeless front-end electronics.  Recently, we presented a low-cost , electrodeless sensor , based on Force Sensitive Resistor , which i s able to simultaneously measure muscle contraction and the mechanomyogram , i.e. the small mechanical vibrations that occur during muscle contraction. The sensor is coupled with the skin through a simple rigid dome and, via a trans-impedance amplifier conditioning circuit, proved capable to consistently generate a signal that is comparable to the well-established EMG linear envelope .   Moreover, the sensor provides other benefits, such as removing the need for noise or artifac...
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