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A flexible skin-mounted wireless acoustic device for bowel sounds monitoring and evaluation

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Abstract

Conventional methods of intestinal inspection play an essential role in the assessment of bowel diseases and other relevant health issues, yet fail to obtain intestinal conditions in real time because of radiation limits and operation inconvenience. Herein, a flexible, skin-mounted device is developed for long-term, real-time monitoring, and for the evaluation of bowel sounds based on the integration of a three-dimensional printed elastomeric resonator with flexible electronics. The device is capable of being flexibly attached to abdominal surfaces without performance degradation during breathing. Clinical tests conduct in a normal volunteer and in patients with mechanical intestinal obstruction or paralytic ileus illustrate the usefulness of the device in capturing the characteristics of bowel sounds. Furthermore, a demonstration of collection and classification of bowel sounds by the flexible device based on machine learning methods can serve as a reference for possible applications of the system in the auxiliary diagnosis of bowel problems.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by National Basic Research Program of China (Grant No. 2015CB351900) and National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 11320101001, 11222220, 11625207).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of Applied Mechanics, Department of Engineering Mechanics, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China

    Fengle Wang, Peng Jin, Yingchao Zhang, Yinji Ma, Ji Fu & Xue Feng

  2. Department of Gastroenterology, Peking Union Medical College Hospital, Beijing, 100730, China

    Dong Wu, Yingyun Yang & Aiming Yang

Authors
  1. Fengle Wang
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  2. Dong Wu
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  3. Peng Jin
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  4. Yingchao Zhang
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  5. Yingyun Yang
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  6. Yinji Ma
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  7. Aiming Yang
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  8. Ji Fu
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  9. Xue Feng
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Ji Fu or Xue Feng.

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Wang, F., Wu, D., Jin, P. et al. A flexible skin-mounted wireless acoustic device for bowel sounds monitoring and evaluation. Sci. China Inf. Sci. 62, 202402 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-019-9906-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-019-9906-1

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