Efficient rectifier design for wearable healthcare applications

Wearable health care systems are an attractive option for continuous monitoring of signals such as ECG and EEG because of their portability and minimization of the discomfort faced by the user. This paper focuses on optimizing a wearable ECG-Monitoring system. The system consists of a Body-Sensor Network made up of patch sensors that are powered wirelessly by an array of inductors placed on a chest band. This array of inductors is in turn controlled by a network controller. In health-care applications, the main focus is on reducing the power consumption of the system. One possible solution is to improve the efficiency of the rectifiers used in the sensor chips. In this work, we propose a modification to the Adaptive Threshold Rectifier design used in the original system that improves the power conversion efficiency of the rectifier from 54.9% to 61.06%.