Portable Brain-Heart Monitoring System

A portable brain-heart monitoring system is proposed to integrate and miniaturize those heavy equipments in the hospitals. The system comprises a 4-channel independent component analysis (ICA) engine for artifact removal from EEG, a heart-rate variability (HRV) analysis engine for on-line HRV analysis and a diffuse optical tomography (DOT) engine for reconstruction of the absorption coefficient image of the brain tissue. A lossless compression module achieves 2.5 compression ratio is also employed to reduce the power consumption of the wireless transmission. EEG, EKG and near-infrared signals acquired from the analog front-end IC are processed in real-time or bypassed according to user configurations. Processed data and raw data are compressed and sent to a remote science station by a commercial Bluetooth module for further analysis and 3-D visualization and remote diagnosis. The ICA and HRV engine are verified by real EEG and EKG signals while the DOT engine is verified by an experimental model. The system is implemented using UMC 65nm CMOS technology, and the core size is 680x680 um(2), and the estimated power consumption of the chip working at 24 MHz under full mode is 3.6 mW.