Wearable EKG Platform

Principal Investigators:

Anantha Chandrakasan, Joel Dawson, Charles Sodini

Postdoctoral Associate:

Nathan Ickes

Students:

Jose Bohorquez, Joyce Kwong, Patrick Mercier, Eric Winokur, Marcus Yip

Description

Advances in mobile electronics are fueling new possibilities in personal ambulatory medical monitoring, in which sophisticated, wearable devices can monitor a patient’s vital signs. As illustrated in the figure below, these signals can be securely transmitted via a local relay (often a cell phone or PDA) to the internet, whereby a physician or an emergency medical monitoring center can observe the data for preventative medicine, diagnostics, or emergency monitoring purposes.

This project aims to develop a platform of scalable, energy-efficient integrated circuits such as reconfigurable analog front-end circuits, ultra-low voltage medical processors and short range communication circuits involving body-area networks to consolidate and transmit sensor node data. From a system level perspective, reconfigurability (in voltage, bandwidth and precision) in the front-end circuits is needed to accommodate a wide range of physiologic signals which can vary by several orders of magnitude in amplitude and frequency. Similarly, programmability in the medical processor enables support of diverse algorithms on various signals such as EKG, EEG, and accelerometer data. Low power consumption is essential for achieving long operating lifetimes, while a compact system form factor is desirable to impose minimal inconvenience to the user such that the system is suitable for long-term, everyday use.

Figure: The vision of connected health care enabled by scalable circuits integrated into a wearable platform, a local relay and the world wide web.