Continuous blood-status monitoring by thoracic impedance or impedance phase measurement [1] is critical in reducing chronic heart failure (CHF) because the symptoms of deterioration are not recognized by patients, thus preventing timely treatment. Therefore, a wearable/implantable bio-impedance (Bio-Z) sensor is required for ambulatory patients to detect early signs of deterioration for appropriate intervention in proper ti…

Recently, skin disease patients have been rising rapidly, and more than 5.4 million cases of skin cancer were treated in over 3.3 million people in the U.S. in 2012, and more people are diagnosed with skin cancer each year than all other cancers combined in the U.S. [1]. Because a malignant lesion is difficult to distinguish from pigmented nevus, elaborate detection devices are needed for accurate diagnosis [2]. Optical Coh…

Intracardiac echocardiography (ICE) is an ultrasound sonogram that visualizes the anatomical structure of the heart in real time, with a mm-scale catheter inserted through the intracardiac vessels, and guides surgical intervention for atrial septal defect (ASD) closure. To achieve high-quality medical imaging, an ICE system must meet stringent power consumption requirements with low-noise operation. Since an ASIC and ultras…

Recently, capsule endoscopes are emerging as an alternative to the cable-attached endoscopes since not only mitigating pain and fear of patients but also acquiring additional information about unexplained lesions for accurate diagnoses. Nevertheless, their applicability has been mainly limited by insufficient viewing angles and image qualities [1]. Especially, a single end-facing camera with VGA resolution images suffers fr…

Electrical impedance tomography (EIT) has been studied to monitor lung ventilation because it is the only real-time lung imaging method without large equipment [1-2]. However, previous EIT systems just provided 2D cross-sectional image with limited spatial information of the lung and unneglectable volume detection error depending on the location of 2D EIT belt relative to the patient's lung. In spite of its importance, the …

There has been recent research into continuous monitoring of the quantitative anesthesia (ANES) depth level for safe surgery [1]. However, the current ANES depth monitoring approach, bispectral index (BIS) [3], uses only EEG from the frontal lobe, and it shows critical limitations in the monitoring of ANES depth such as signal distortion due to electrocautery, EMG and dried gel, and false response to the special types of an…

Recently, OLED is replacing semiconductor LEDs in many applications for broader light emission and low fabrication cost. In addition, Organic Photo Detector (OPD) and OLED can be fabricated on the same substrate with the same process and the OLED film itself can be used for the integration substrate of the other functional ICs. In this paper, we present a new SpO2/ExG monitoring sticker integrating OLED/OPD with CMOS SoC. I…

Recently, smart phones or head mount displays enable high-definition (HD) video stream and image data to be shared with friends while the wearable smart sensors continuously monitor and send user’s physiological information to the smart watch. The body channel communication (BCC) which uses the human body as the communication channel has shown better human-friendly interface and energy-efficient performance compared with ai…

Recently, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that mental illnesses account for an increasing proportion of disability in developed countries. In the modern society, mental stress is particularly the cause of not only psychological disorder, such as anger, anxiety, depression and sleep apnea, but also physical disorder, such as upset stomach, fatigue, headache, muscle tension and sex drive. Furthermore, it i…

Recently, there are many reports on the measurement of mental health conditions as derived from physiological parameters. Usually, heart-rate or heart rate variability (HRV) has been used for monitoring mental health because of its strong dependency on the autonomic nervous system (ANS). It is claimed that HRV, which represents the effect of ANS, and EEG, which is the primary signal of the central nervous system (CNS), shou…

Recently, several research have been reported to the early detection of breast cancer. But most of the previous detection system like X-ray mammography and ultrasonic screening are mainly used in hospitals. However, for personal cancer detection at home, currently, only unscientific palpatio…

Mechanical ventilation is essential for patients with acute lung injury (ALI) in ICU. Inadequate me-chanical ventilation can sometimes develop ventilator-induced lung injury (VILI) which has high mortal-ity of 41%. To prevent VILI, a real-time lung monitoring system is needed to find lung ti…

Ultra-low-power wireless connectivity among devices placed in, on and around the human body is the key technology for continuous, automated, and unobtrusive monitoring of physiological signals. Recently, the IEEE Standards Association established a wireless body-area-network (WBAN) standard for a short-range, low-power and highly reliable wireless communication around the human body. According to the standard, WBAN is compo…

For the administration of drugs, oral and needle-based methods have been universally used to date. However, these methods result in various unwanted side effects, such as hepatic first-pass effect, infection, and pain. To avoid these side effects, a transdermal drug delivery method represents an attractive alternative to oral delivery and hypodermic injection. Transdermal drug delivery is a noninvasive technique which deliv…

Wirelss body-area networks (WBANs) are an emerging technology that can combine healthcare and consumer electronic applications around the human body. By continuously connecting and sharing the information around the human body, WBANs are expected to bring new convenient usages and application services to mobile devices. Previous BCC transceivers were not optimized for WBAN because the only phenomenological circuit/behavior …

People generally spend almost 1/3 of their lifetime for sleep. Since good sleep is indispensable to the better quality of human life, it has been regarded as one of the important factors for the healthy life in these days. But many people sometimes experience a sleep disorder, which is a medical disorder of the sleep patterns such as sleep apnea, insomnia, narcolepsy, sleepwalking, and so on. Currently, over 40 million Amer…

In these days, personal mobile devices such as smart phones or PDAs are widely used in daily life, and proximity communication between them also becomes popular to conveniently transmit video, audio, graphics, or text-type data. Since their data file size is usually large, the proximity communication in mobile devices should satisfy more stringent requirements. It should support high-speed communication, and low energy cons…

Irregular life style such as lack of physical exercise, overeating, and excessive drinking leads to a heart disease. Actually, it is the worldwide largest killer and claims over 10 millions of lives a year. Among them, failure of the proper blood circulation by a blockage due to a build-up of fatty deposits accumulated on the inner walls of blood vessels dominantly occurs. Since it is a chronic process, the heart attack may…

With the increasing number of portable and implantable personal helath care devices, there is a strong demand to control their communication in a single wireless network. Recently, the IEEE 802.15 WBAN task group has discussed the combining of wearable and implantable body sensor networks(BSNs), but no real chip implementation has been reported before this work. In this Biocle III project, the simple implementation of a uni…

With the aging of societies around the world, chronic diseases are becoming the major cause of death. An important perspective on the chronic diseases is that the sooner they are detected, the better quality of life the patients will have. Since the diseases have asymptomatic or intermittent properties, long-term continuous health monitoring is essential in detecting and treating the diseases. Moreover, continuous health mo…

With the aging of societies around the world, chronic diseases are becoming the major cause of death. An important perspective on the chronic diseases is that the sooner they are detected, the better quality of life the patients will have. Since the diseases have asymptomatic or intermittent properties, long-term continuous health monitoring is essential in detecting and treating the diseases. Moreover, continuous health mo…

Wireless body-area network (WBAN) is an emerging area that combines health care and comsumer electronics applications and its standardization is still in progress. The WPAN standards such as IEEE 802.15.4 and 4a do not meet the WBAN requirements such as energy efficiency on the body, scalable QoS, and inter-networks isolation. Due to energy absorption in the human tissue, propagation loss of the WPAN channel is over 50dB, a…

Recently, fabric area network, or wearable network has been investigated to form a body sensor network (BSN) for healthcare or multimedia applications. Wearable network has 4 unique networking situations: 
  First, since clothes are multilayered, such as underwear, inner we…

Recently, several research results have been reported on the integration of electronics with textiles such as the wearable computer and e-textiles. Most of the previous works were based mainly on conducting threads, yarns, and woven fabrics to implement the interconnections, like the wearable motherboard. For the integration of the IC with fabric, they placed the silicon chip on a flexible plastic board and then integrated …

Physiological signals such as body temperature, heart rates and electrocardiogram (ECG) have been widely utilized for health monitoring applications. In order to detect the signals without cumbersome wires, heterogeneous body sensor nodes including wearable or implantable biomedical devices are wirelessly connected to each other forming a personal body sensor network (BSN). The physiological signals show different bandwidth…

Wearable or implantable biomedical devices can be used for health management using body area connectivity. There is one approach to implementing on-body networks using the human body as a transmission medium, called Body Channel Communication (BCC). Recently proposed BCC schemes use the human body itself as the data transmission medium. Historically, near-field electrostatic coupling using a low frequency signal w…