A wearable, low-power, health-monitoring instrumentation based on a programmable system-on-chipTM

Improvement in quality and efficiency of health and medicine, at home and in hospital, has become of paramount importance. The solution of this problem would require the continuous monitoring of several key patient parameters, including the assessment of autonomic nervous system (ANS) activity using non-invasive sensors, providing information for emotional, sensorial, cognitive and physiological analysis of the patient. Recent advances in embedded systems, microelectronics, sensors and wireless networking enable the design of wearable systems capable of such advanced health monitoring. The subject of this article is an ambulatory system comprising a small wrist device connected to several sensors for the detection of the autonomic nervous system activity. It affords monitoring of skin resistance, skin temperature and heart activity. It is also capable of recording the data on a removable media or sending it to computer via a wireless communication. The wrist device is based on a programmable system-on-chip (PSoCtrade) from Cypress: PSoCs are mixed-signal arrays, with dynamic, configurable digital and analogical blocks and an 8-bit microcontroller unit (MCU) core on a single chip. In this paper we present first of all the hardware and software architecture of the device, and then results obtained from initial experiments.