Reconfigurable Multiparameter Biosignal Acquisition SoC for Low Power Wearable Platform

Abstract

A low power and low noise reconfigurable analog front-end (AFE) system on a chip (SoC) for biosignal acquisition is presented. The presented AFE can be reconfigured for use in electropotential, bioimpedance, electrochemical, and photoelectrical modes. The advanced healthcare services based on multiparameter physiological biosignals can be easily implemented with these multimodal and highly reconfigurable features of the proposed system. The reconfigurable gain and input referred noise of the core instrumentation amplifier block are 25 dB to 52 dB, and 1 μVRMS, respectively. The power consumption of the analog blocks in one readout channel is less than 52 μW. The reconfigurable capability among various modes of applications including electrocardiogram, blood glucose concentration, respiration, and photoplethysmography are shown experimentally.

A 36 μW 1.1 mm2 Reconfigurable Analog Front-End for Cardiovascular and Respiratory Signals Recording

“…The proposed R-AFE utilizing dynamic circuit techniques has achieved very competitive performance (ECG noise, BioZ sensitivity and CMRR) to the dedicated ECG/BioZ ICs and the multi-sensor ICs, but with 10x lower power than [1][2] [5] and approximately 5.3x smaller channel area than [4]. Compared to other R-AFEs, this work consumes similar power but with ~10x lower noise than [6] and roughly ~8.4x smaller channel area than [7]. Compared to all these prior art works, the proposed R-AFE supports the most types of sensing modalities.…”

“…31) of the subject are easily recognized. Table I compares the R-AFE with state-of-the-art dedicated ECG and BioZ readout [1] [2], multi-sensor readout [4] [5], and R-AFE [6] [7]. The proposed R-AFE utilizing dynamic circuit techniques has achieved very competitive performance (ECG noise, BioZ sensitivity and CMRR) to the dedicated ECG/BioZ ICs and the multi-sensor ICs, but with 10x lower power than [1][2] [5] and approximately 5.3x smaller channel area than [4].…”

“…Compared to all these prior art works, the proposed R-AFE supports the most types of sensing modalities. JSSC'16 [4] ESSCIRC'15 [5] JSSC'14 [6] Sensors'16 [7] This work A highly reconfigurable AFE is proposed for wearable and miniaturized cardiovascular and respiratory signals acquisition. The AFE occupies an area of 1.1mm 2 and supports five sensing modes including ECG, BioZ, GSR, PPG and GPA.…”

“…However, this often requires a large chip area (>10mm 2 ) and thus being expensive and less flexible. The reconfigurable AFEs (R-AFEs) [6] [7] measure multimodal (bio-)signals while still being compact and low cost. They show promising results but the remaining challenges are performance optimization of noise, power dissipation and reconfigurability J.…”

A Smart Wireless Ear-Worn Device for Cardiovascular and Sweat Parameter Monitoring During Physical Exercise: Design and Performance Results

“…Our approach is to integrate multimodal sensing into a single device by making use of discrete off-the-shelf components. Another approaches use either large commercial chipsets or system-on-chip design into a custom-made smaller chip, which can integrate many functions and sensing capabilities by reconfiguring the basic analogue front-end blocks involved in the measurement of bio-potential, impedance and/or chemical analytes [22,23]. However, this latter approach has several disadvantages including longer design-to-production times and the inability to measure all modalities in simultaneous, besides requiring logical signals and reference clocks to select the desirable configuration, filter tuning and control that adds extra modulation noise originating from external complex digital circuitry.…”