Toward an integrated, low-power platform for continuous congestive heart failure monitoring

This research presents a novel architecture of an ultra-low-power wearable system for congestive heart failure (CHF) monitoring using the continuous measurement of a patient’s weight to detect changes in body mass and fluid composition. Shoe-integrated sensor arrays are used to continuously measure the weight, and an electronic digital assistant, implemented in VLSI, is used to further analyze the acquired measurements in real time. To achieve ultra-low-power operation, the human body is used as a communication medium between the shoe-mounted sensors and the digital assistant. The single-channel behavior of the human body is accommodated with a novel, simple yet robust single-wire signaling technique that is called Pulsed-Index Communication (PIC). This signaling technique significantly reduces the system footprint and its overall power consumption as it entirely eliminates the need for circuitry dedicated to clock and data recovery. The proof-of-concept CHF system has been prototyped using a FPGA platform, the Virtex 7 from Xilinx. The prototype, which integrates models for footwear, body communication channel (BCC), and back-end digital electronics, has been rigorously and successfully tested. This highly modular system is being used to implement, analyze, and compare various pattern recognition algorithms for the early detection of congestive heart failure.