When researchers Stephen J. Spikings, Bashir M. Al-Hashimi, and Nick R. Harris of the University of Southhampton in England wanted to monitor the well-being of a person on a bed based on measuring their weight, they turned to Loadstar Sensors' Digital USB Load Cells for its low profile, low cost and ease of use.

The iLoad Load Cells look like round hockey pucks about 3 inches in diameter and half an inch high, these capacitive load cells have integrated electronics housed inside the package and offer direct USB connectivity directly from load cell without need for any external signal conditioning electronics.  Put one under each corner of the bed under the foot and plug the four units into a USB Hub and then into the PC.  Using LoadVUE Pro LV-4000 software, one can gather data at up to 500 Hz data update rate.

You can read the entire contents of the research summary Unobtrusive_Welfare_Monitoring_System.pdf.

The late Dr. Tamara Hayes and her team at the Oregon Science and Health University wanted to study the patterns of sleep of a patient to identify if a patient was suffering from Sleep Apnea they also came to Loadstar Sensors and used our iLoad Pro Load Cell to study the variation of a patients weight on a bed.  They needed load cells with the capacbility to bear the weight of the bed and the patient on the bed, but with the sensitivity to measure small variations in the weigh with breathing rhythms of the patient to be able to identify anomalies in the patterns.  The team used this four load cell kit to conduct their experiments: