Glucose monitoring technology has been used in the management of diabetes for three decades. Traditional devices use enzymatic methods to measure glucose concentration and provide point sample ...information. More recently continuous glucose monitoring devices have become available providing more detailed data on glucose excursions. In future applications the continuous glucose sensor may become a critical component of the closed loop insulin delivery system and, as such, must be selective, rapid, predictable and acceptable for continuous patient use. Many potential sensing modalities are being pursued including optical and transdermal techniques. This review aims to summarize existing technology, the methods for assessing glucose sensing devices and provide an overview of emergent sensing modalities.
In this communication, the simulation and experimental results of a novel wideband wearable circularly polarized textile antenna for low-power transmission in the 2.45 GHz ISM band are presented. The ...wide impedance and axial ratio bandwidths make it perfect for low microwave power transmission to a wearable sensor system. The antenna is flexible, robust and light weight so that it can be easily integrated into clothes. It is shown that the circularly polarized textile antenna has a 3-dB axial ratio bandwidth of 564 MHz (23%) and a {-}10 dB impedance bandwidth of 1086 MHz (44%) on a human body with the maximum gain of 4.9 dBic. Lastly, the textile antenna is employed on the battery-less temperature sensor system on a human arm to demonstrate the effective power transmission over a metre distance.
This paper presents a novel energy-efficient MAC Protocol designed specifically for wireless body area sensor networks (WBASN) focused towards pervasive healthcare applications. Wireless body area ...networks consist of wireless sensor nodes attached to the human body to monitor vital signs such as body temperature, activity or heart-rate. The network adopts a master-slave architecture, where the body-worn slave node periodically sends sensor readings to a central master node. Unlike traditional peer-to-peer wireless sensor networks, the nodes in this biomedical WBASN are not deployed in an ad hoc fashion. Joining a network is centrally managed and all communications are single-hop. To reduce energy consumption, all the sensor nodes are in standby or sleep mode until the centrally assigned time slot. Once a node has joined a network, there is no possibility of collision within a cluster as all communication is initiated by the central node and is addressed uniquely to a slave node. To avoid collisions with nearby transmitters, a clear channel assessment algorithm based on standard listen-before-transmit (LBT) is used. To handle time slot overlaps, the novel concept of a wakeup fallback time is introduced. Using single-hop communication and centrally controlled sleep/wakeup times leads to significant energy reductions for this application compared to more ldquoflexiblerdquo network MAC protocols such as 802.11 or Zigbee. As duty cycle is reduced, the overall power consumption approaches the standby power. The protocol is implemented in hardware as part of the Sensiumtrade system-on-chip WBASN ASIC, in a 0.13- mum CMOS process.
We report the development of a novel multi-tier interface which enables the wireless, noninvasive transfer of sufficient amounts of power as well as the collection and transmission of data from ...low-power, deeply implantable analog sensors. The interface consists of an inductive coupling subsystem and an ultrasonic subsystem. The designed and experimentally verified inductive subsystem ensures that 5 W of power is transferred across 10 mm of air gap between a single pair of PCB spiral coils with an efficiency of 83% using our prototype CMOS logic gate-based driver circuit. The implemented ultrasonic subsystem, based on ultrasonic PZT ceramic discs driven in their low-frequency, radial/planar-excitation mode, further ensures that 29 μW of power is delivered 70 mm deeper inside a homogenous liquid environment-with no acoustic matching layer employed-with an efficiency of 1%. Overall system power consumption is 2.3 W. The implant is intermittently powered every 800 msec; charging a capacitor which provides sufficient power for a duration of ~ 18 msec; sufficient for an implant μC operating at a frequency of 500 KHz to transmit a nibble (4 bits) of digitized sensed data.
A new current comparator is proposed that is optimised for low power consumption whilst maintaining high speed. This novel comparator design offers a reduction in power consumption of over three ...orders of magnitude compared with other high-speed designs, and allows picoampere current decisions at kilohertz frequencies. Circuit simulations were performed in Cadence software for a standard 0.35mum process.
The timely detection of viremia in HIV-infected patients receiving antiviral treatment is key to ensuring effective therapy and preventing the emergence of drug resistance. In high HIV burden ...settings, the cost and complexity of diagnostics limit their availability. We have developed a novel complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) chip based, pH-mediated, point-of-care HIV-1 viral load monitoring assay that simultaneously amplifies and detects HIV-1 RNA. A novel low-buffer HIV-1 pH-LAMP (loop-mediated isothermal amplification) assay was optimised and incorporated into a pH sensitive CMOS chip. Screening of 991 clinical samples (164 on the chip) yielded a sensitivity of 95% (in vitro) and 88.8% (on-chip) at >1000 RNA copies/reaction across a broad spectrum of HIV-1 viral clades. Median time to detection was 20.8 minutes in samples with >1000 copies RNA. The sensitivity, specificity and reproducibility are close to that required to produce a point-of-care device which would be of benefit in resource poor regions, and could be performed on an USB stick or similar low power device.
The electrical behavior of the Xenopus laevis nerve fibers was studied when combined electrical (cuff electrodes) and optical (infrared laser, low power sub-5 mW) stimulations are applied. Assuming ...that the main effect of the laser irradiation on the nerve tissue is the localized temperature increase, this paper analyzes and gives new insights into the function of the combined thermoelectric stimulation on both excitation and blocking of the nerve action potentials (AP). The calculations involve a finite-element model (COMSOL) to represent the electrical properties of the nerve and cuff. Electric-field distribution along the nerve was computed for the given stimulation current profile and imported into a NEURON model, which was built to simulate the electrical behavior of myelinated nerve fiber under extracellular stimulation. The main result of this study of combined thermoelectric stimulation showed that local temperature increase, for the given electric field, can create a transient block of both the generation and propagation of the APs. Some preliminary experimental data in support of this conclusion are also shown.
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