Ultra-low-power biopotential interfaces and their applications in wearable and implantable systems

Traditionally the monitoring of the biopotential signals are only limited to clinical applications. On the other hand, there is a growing demand for these biopotential signals to be used in non-clinical applications in order to improve the quality of life and enable the interaction between humans and machines. However, such non-clinical applications of biopotential signal monitoring requires various improvements not only in terms of size and comfort of the biopotential acquisition systems, but also in terms of their power dissipation. An important building block of the biopotential acquisition systems is the front-end circuitry that defines the quality of the extracted signals and unfortunately consumes unacceptable power, when the currently available circuitry is considered. Therefore, this paper focuses on the advances in low-power and high-performance readout circuit design for the acquisition of biopotential signals. In addition, several application examples will be demonstrated, which proves that the realization of high-performance and low-power readout circuits can actually enable the implementation of miniaturized and comfortable biopotential acquisition systems extending the usage of such systems towards non-clinical applications. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. Ail rights reserved.