A quasi-digital radio system for muscle force transmission based on event-driven IR-UWB

We introduce a low-complexity radio system for portable and miniaturized biomedical applications based on IR-UWB which can effectively transmit and receive muscle force information without requiring analog to digital conversion for signal digitizing. EMG signals are acquired using a discrete components instrumentation amplifier that asynchronously triggers an integrated pulsed transmitter. After the EMG signal is acquired, signal is thresholded, pulses are radiated and acquired using an integrated asynchronous IR-UWB receiver. This paper demonstrates system operation and compares the performance of the scheme in terms of average threshold crossings pulse events with rectified values computed on the raw analog muscle information, obtaining a correlation level of 0.95±0.02 compared to average rectified EMG signals. The paper concludes with first over-the-air measurements on an implemented prototype based on an RFCMOS integrated transceiver chipset.