This is a small and lightweight device that can be worn on the ear or on glasses (recommended) and is designed to measure accurate cardiovascular information through the superficial temporal artery near the ears. The measurable information includes blood pressure, heart rate, blood oxygen saturation level and pulse waveform. Accurate measurement of this information can not only help people understand and monitor their health conditions, but also enable some remote disease prediction and diagnosis such as hypertension, heart failure, type I diabetes, etc.

Compared to current commercialized wearable/smart devices, like FitBit or iWatch, our device can support many beneficial healthcare functions they don’t and can’t. Most current wearable devices are worn on wrist. It is well-known that wrist is the one of the most flexible joint of human body. The activity patterns of the wrist are various and complex, which makes it hard for the sensor to stably touch the sensed target (radial artery). It is almost impossible for these devices to perform accurate measurement via today’s technology. However, benefitted from limited activity of head and ears, sensing of our device can be as stable as wearing glasses; there is no influence at all from human daily activity on sensing, which makes the vital parameters measurement possible and accurate and enables further disease prediction and diagnosis.

Also, our device integrates fitness function. User’s daily physical activities can be monitored and recorded. Due to simpler activity pattern of the head, monitoring can be much easier and more accurate. Besides monitoring walking, running, biking and stationary that the current wearable devices support, the device can 1) detect more activity patterns like jumping and 2) notice user to hold head up high every time head is low when reading or walking.

This wearable device mainly uses three sensors: photoplethysmogram (PPG) sensor, pressure sensor and 9-axis accelerometer. They are all mature technology and have been commercialized. All other chips are also available in current market. A simulation-verified solution has demonstrated the device can integrated and packaged as small as the concept design shows (approximately). The weight could be only 6 grams.

Raw sensor data will be processed and transmitted to smart phone through Bluetooth. User can view health and fitness data and get services from Apps. Combining with Cloud-based data platform, the device can make Big Health Data accessed, shared, analyzed and transferred to all kinds services. The data user may include insurance company, hospital, research institute, healthcare company. As hardware, the device can be worn by the elderly people or patients for health condition monitoring (a great many people looking for a way to monitor their parents’ health remotely) or by the young for fitness and nice figure. As software, the device can speed up building Internet of Health and enable health/fitness Big Data, which further contribute to making a better life.