Wireless Health Monitoring Basedon Biomedical System on a Chip

WearMeSoC RTD 2013

Q. Huang, F. Schulthess, P. Schönle, S. Fateh, T. BurgerIntegrated Systems Laboratory – ETH Zürich

Abstract – Aging population and increasing medical costs in industrialized nations require the development of novelminiaturized healthcare devices for use in ambulatory environments and outpatient monitoring applications. Theprevalence of Machine-to-Machine Communication (M2M) together with the increasing availability of inexpensive handheldcomputers offer a new way of meeting this demand. WearMeSoC plans to develop a matchbox-sized healthcare devicebased on a biomedical System on a Chip (SoC) with wireless connectivity. Real-world medical scenarios including post-operative patient monitoring, treatment of sleep disorders, assessment of driving capability and study of altitude-relateddisorders will be used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the system.

SoC-Based Healthcare Device

• Miniature size is inevitable for developing new approaches for non-intrusive patient monitoring: no more need for bulky devices whichlimit a patient’s mobility.

• Low-power operation maximizes recording time. Efficient powermanagement of the SoC is used to adapt RF duty cycle to specificapplication needs.

• Multi-purpose sensor and actuator circuitry covering the mostcommon medical tests: ECG, EEG, pulse oximetry.

Post-Operative Patient Monitoring

Treatment of Sleep Disorders

Assessment of Driving Capability

Study of Altitude-Related Disorders

• Prompt relocation of pa-tients from ICU to normalward lowers healthcarecosts.

• Most important tests aremonitored: ECG andpulse oximetry.

• Integration of systeminto IT infrastructure ofhospital for alerting.

• Usage of miniature de-vice with SoC to recordEEG during sleep non-intrusively, possibly evenat home.

• Off-line signal analysis isconducted in the sleeplaboratory.

• Possibility to automatediagnosis or alerting.

• Eye and head movementcan be captured withskin electrodes.

• Records where peoplelook when driving.

• Planned system meetsdemand for a way toobjectively assess dri-ving capability of elderlypeople.

• Conduct field studies inorder to analyze respi-ratory system in high-altitude areas.

• Assess workplace safetyin some areas.

• Portable device withoutwires does not encum-ber subject during usualactivities.

Functional overview of the planned SoC togetherwith external peripherals.

Visualization of matchbox-sized healthcare device.

• High-sensitivity analog front-endguarantees low-noise recording.

• Flexible digital signal processingblocks implemented in hardware.Control via state-of-the-art embed-ded processor.

• Several SoCs are cascadable inorder to serve applications thatrequire a higher number of inputchannels.

Memory Management

Data Aquisitionchannels

Actuators

Test &Debug

Power SupplyManagement Clock

InterfacesDigital Signal

Processing

BluetoothFM

Radio

GSM/GPRSCellularModem

RAM & EEPROM

CrystalBattery

EEG1EEG2

ECG1ECG2

. . .

. . .

Oximetry1Oximetry2

. . .

WearMeSoC

Others