Acoustic monitoring using PyzoFlex®: a novel printed sensor for smart consumer products

Acoustic monitoring has always been a niche area in the field of monitoring applications compared to other modalities, such as computer vision. Over the last decades, the number of applications for acoustic monitoring has been growing and ranges from predictive maintenance within the industrial sector to acoustic scene classification and security monitoring in traffic and urban scenarios. With the rise of the internet-of-things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI) in recent years, smart consumer products and devices have pushed forward using different sensor technologies to enhance the user experience. To this end, acoustic monitoring is still an underestimated discipline with great potential to serve as a missing link in smart sensing within environments where other modalities face difficulties. In this paper, we present PyzoFlex®, a printable sensor technology which facilitates accurate measurement of pressure and temperature changes in objects and their environment, as a sensor interface for acoustic monitoring applications. In contrast to microphones or acceleration sensors, PyzoFlex may be printed onto any curved or textured surface. To demonstrate the possibilities, we present a case study in which we equip a coffee machine with PyzoFlex to acoustically monitor the machine states in real-time using a machine learning model.