Professor Jiang Zhuangde, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and professor of the School of Mechanical Engineering at Xi'an Jiaotong University (XJTU), along with the team of Zhao Libo from the School of Instrument Science and Technology, and the teams of Professors Lyu Yi and Wu Rongqian from the First Affiliated Hospital of XJTU, have jointly developed a skin-adaptive focused flexible micromachined ultrasound transducer array.

The device can attach to the surface of human skin to achieve non-invasive, real-time, and continuous detection of multiple blood flow parameters, including blood pressure, heart rate, and vascular stiffness.

This research proposes a skin-adaptive focused ultrasound (SAFU) method for multi-parameter blood flow measurement. By utilizing in-phase excitation of all array elements and the inherent curvature characteristics of the skin, the array-transmitted ultrasound beam is focused, forming a "football-shaped" acoustic beam. Based on the inherent relationship between skin curvature and the depth and size of subcutaneous blood vessels, the focused acoustic beam is adaptively adjusted.

Through rational design of the array structure parameters, the focusing acoustic beam depth and width range (beam width of 2.1-4.6 millimeters, penetration depth of 3.3-53 mm) of the developed ultrasound array can vary with the curvature of the skin surface, covering typical human arterial vascular regions such as finger-end arteries, radial arteries, brachial arteries, and carotid arteries and achieving high-precision, high signal-to-noise ratio, and wide-depth range blood flow parameter detection.

The research results, titled Skin-Adaptive-Focused Flexible Micromachined Ultrasound Transducers for Wearable Cardiovascular Health Monitoring, were recently published online in Science Advances, a sub-journal of Science.