Wearable Autonomous Wireless Electro-encephalography System Fully Powered by Human Body Heat

Monitoring of Vital Signs with Flexible and Wearable Medical Devices

“…[ 164,178,181,186 ] The 1 V or greater voltage levels required by most electronics are thus achieved by connecting dozens of thermoelectric generators in series [ 143,182 ] or by using power electronics to boost the voltage. [ 118,187 ] Nevertheless, wearable thermoelectric generators have been used to power a number of medical sensing devices including a glucose sensor, [ 182 ] pulse oximeter, [ 187 ] and electroencephalogram. [ 118 ] The various motions of the human body, including footsteps, motion of limbs, fl exing of muscles, and breathing, are also sources of energy that can be used to power sensors.…”

Wearable Electroencephalography

“…It is believed that such techniques may harvest up to 100 lW, significantly relaxing the power constraints, and [37] describes a two-channel EEG system powered by body heat alone. The drawback of this is that the power source will not scale to a large number of channels and is nonconstant, which may present regulatory issues.…”

“…Table 3 illustrates the energy storage capacity and physical size of a range of current commercial batteries, and the power draw tradeoff is illustrated in Figure 4. Figure 4 also highlights where typical state-of-the-art EEG systems operate, e.g., Advanced Brain Monitoring's B-Alert at 200 mW for a six-channel system [38] and the Interuniversity Microelectronics Center's (IMEC) system operating at 800 lW with two channels [37].…”

Wearable Thermoelectric Generators for Body-Powered Devices

“…Devices consuming about 1 mW or less, such as health monitoring sensors, can be proposed as candidates for self-powering. First examples of body-powered wireless devices, namely, the pulse oximeter, 17,18 working at 62 lW power consumption, and a two-channel electroencephalography system 13 (0.8 mW), as shown in Fig. 4, have been demonstrated recently.…”