Short Course: Design Strategies for Wearable Sensor Interface Circuits
Jerald Yoo · 2014
“Wearable healthcare sensors provide attractive opportunities for the semiconductor sector. The target is to mitigate the impact of chronic diseases by providing continuous yet adequate low-noise monitoring and analysis of physiological signals. The wearable environment is challenging for circuit designers due to its unstable skin-electrode interface. Wet and dry electrodes have very different electrical characteristics that need to be addressed. Also, in a wearable environment, a trade-off between available resources and component performance (analog front-end and digital back-end) is crucial. This short course covers the design strategies for bio-interface circuits for such wearable sensors. We first explore the difficulties, limitations and potential pitfalls in wearable interfaces, and strategies to overcome them. After that, system-level considerations for better key metrics such as energy efficiency are introduced. Several state-of-the-art instrumentation amplifiers that emphasize different parameters are also discussed. We then see how the signal analysis part impacts the analog interface circuit design. The talk concludes with interesting aspects and opportunities that lie ahead.”