Towards wearable spectroscopy bioimpedance applications: power management for a battery driven impedance meter

Abstract

In recent years, due to the combination of technological advances in the fields of measurement instrumentation, communications, home-health care and textile-technology the development of medical devices has shifted towards applications of personal healthcare. There are well known the available solutions for heart rate monitoring successfully provided by Polar and Numetrex. Furthermore new monitoring applications are also investigated. Among these non-invasive monitoring applications, it is possible to find several ones enable by measurements of Electrical Bioimpedance. Analog Devices has developed the AD5933 Impedance Network Analyzer which facilitates to a large extent the design and implementation of Electrical Bioimpedance Spectrometers in a much reduced space. Such small size allows the development of a fully wearable bioimpedance measurement. With the development of a Electrical Bioimpedance-enable wearable medical device in focus for personal healthcare monitoring, in this project, the issue of power management has been targeted and a battery-driven Electrical Bioimpedance Spectrometer based in the AD5933 has been implemented. The resulting system has the possibility to operate with a Li-Po battery with a power autonomy over 17 hours.