The Design of Integrated Circuit for Biomedical and mHealth Application

Portable, wearable and networked medical devices for the diagnosis, monitoring, and treatment of diseases are vital and desired for future mHealth applications. For the pursuit of convenience, low power and low cost, the system of mHealth instrumentations should be developed as small as possible and the power consumption should be the lower the better, therefore; integrated circuits (ICs) designed for biomedical fields are necessary in these mHealth applications.

The key challenge in designing biomedical ICs is the pursuit of low frequency, low noise, and low power, and thus, there is a tradeoff between noise and power, and tradeoff between area, cost and bandwidth, because: 1) biomedical signals are usually low frequency, week and noisy, and 2) the relevant biomedical devices should be wearable and portable in the practical applications.

In this chapter, the recent low power, low noise and low frequency IC design technologies which have been used in multi-parameters, human-body signal monitoring and processing are introduced. These technologies are suitable for biomedical and mHealth applications including the design of analog circuits such as amplifiers and filters, digital circuits, and radio-frequency (RF) circuits which are widely used in physiological signal acquisition, signal processing and in the signal transmission respectively. In the last, some synthetic systems are introduced.