Low Power and Miniaturized Wearable Medical Device: Prototype Study
摘要
Wearable or portable devices are becoming increasingly popular in consumer electronics as well as medical and industrial applications. In order for these devices to be comfortable and desirable to wear, they must have low battery consumption and be small in volume and weight. The EGluco project is developing a wearable device for non-invasive blood glucose monitoring. It is a multi-sensor device that uses electrical bioimpedance spectroscopy as one of its measurement strategies. One of the versions of the device had characteristics that made it inappropriate as a wearable device, such as large volume and high power consumption. In order to bring this device closer to the characteristics of a wearable device, the previous hardware was analyzed and a new one was proposed, simplifying the power supply of the system and also reducing the supply voltage. One of these projects is presented in this article. It is an enhanced Howland current source that has a supply voltage of 3.3 V, an output current level of 250 \(\upmu \) A, and can perform bioimpedance analysis up to 1 MHz of pulsed DIBS-type (Discrete Interval Binary Sequency) signals. By simplifying the power supply system and other measures, the volume of the device has been reduced, resulting in a single 5 \(\times \) 5 cm circuit board instead of the previous 4 circuit boards connected by cables.