An Integrated, Low-Power Platform for Continuous Congestive Heart Failure Monitor using Body-Channel Communication

Abstract

This research presents a novel 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 measure continuously the weight, and an electronic digital assistant, implemented in VLSI, is used to analyze further 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 we have called Pulsed-Index Communication (MI provisional patent pending). 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 CHF system has been fully prototyped using a cutting-edge FPGA platform, namely, Virtex 7 from Xilinx. The prototype, which integrates models for footwear, body area network (BAN), 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. The research described in this thesis has been conducted under the Abu Dhabi – SRC Center of Excellence on Energy-Efficient Electronic Systems (ACE4S).

Date of Award	Aug 2015
Original language	American English
Supervisor	IBRAHIM Elfadel (Supervisor)