A Low-Power Bio-Potential Acquisition System with Flexible PDMS Dry Electrodes for Portable Ubiquitous Healthcare Applications

Sensors

Chih-Yuan Chen⁵  Chia-Lin Chang⁵  Chih-Wei Chang⁴  Shin-Chi Lai⁵  Tsung-Fu Chien²  Hong-Yi Huang³  Jin-Chern Chiou¹ 

[1]Department of Electrical Engineering, National Chiao Tung University, 300 Hsinchu, Taiwan

[2] E-Mail:

[3]Department of Electrical Engineering, Southern Taiwan University, 710 Tainan, Taiwan

[4] E-Mail:

[5]Graduate Institute of Electrical Engineering, National Taipei University, 237 Taipei, Taiwan

[6] E-Mail:

[7]Department of Bioengineering, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA

[8] E-Mail:

[9]Instrumentation Chip Group, Department of Electric Engineering, National Cheng Kung University, 701 Tainan, Taiwan

[10] E-Mails:

关键词: dry electrode;    PDMS;    PMMA;    bio-potential acquisition system;    ECG;   

DOI  :  10.3390/s130303077

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

This work describes a bio-potential acquisition system for portable ubiquitous healthcare applications using flexible polydimethylsiloxane dry electrodes (FPDEs) and a low-power recording circuit. This novel FPDE used Au as the skin contact layer, which was made using a CO₂ laser and replica method technology. The FPDE was revised from a commercial bio-potential electrode with a conductive snap using dry electrodes rather than wet electrodes that proposed reliable and robust attachment for the purpose of measurement, and attaching velcro made it wearable on the forearm for bio-potential applications. Furthermore, this study proposes a recording device to store bio-potential signal data and provides portability and low-power consumption for the proposed acquisition system. To acquire differential bio-potentials, such as electrocardiogram (ECG) signals, the proposed recording device includes a low-power front-end acquisition chip fabricated using a complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) process, a commercial microcontroller (MSP430F149), and a secure digital (SD) card for portable healthcare applications. The proposed system can obtain ECG signals efficiently and are comfortable to the skin. The power consumption of the system is about 85 mW for continuous working over a 3 day period with two AA batteries. It can also be used as a compact Holter ECG system.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2013 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.