by Jan Provoost, science editor, imec

May 27, 2011 – Closing the technical sessions of this year’s ITF, Harmke de Groot, imec program director for ultralow-power technologies, discussed automated body monitoring, and how it could impact future healthcare.

The vision she painted is one of unobtrusive, comfortable sensors that are worn on the body — possibly hidden into clothing, attached to the body as intelligent patches, or even, in the extreme case, implanted. Sensors that measure body parameters and send them wirelessly to a base station and from there on to the hospital.

People suffering from chronic diseases, or elderly people that need watching, could be monitored from their homes. The result would be a win-win: for the healthcare system, automated home monitoring would be cheaper and would free many resources; and for patients, they could be monitored without leaving their homes, permanently and comfortably.

To make this vision come true technically, most of the raw building blocks are available, e.g. sensors, wireless radios, etc. The main exercise now is to integrate these in a package that really delivers on the promise.

One issue, for example, is energy use and autonomy. To make home monitoring really attractive, you’d need sensors that can work for weeks without needing to be replaced or batteries recharged. That is no easy requirement, requiring orders-of-magnitude gain in energy efficiency compared to commercially available electronics. Over the past few years, imec has done a lot of R&D in this area. Recently, it unveiled a new ultralow-power radio component, dedicated for use in body sensors, and a new versatile ultralow-power biomedical signal processor, CoolFlux, made in collaboration with NXP. With these components, and through careful co-design and co-optimization of all the components, imec made monitoring nodes that sense, compute, and send for over a week on a single small battery.

To illustrate the possibilities, imec integrated its components in prototype applications, for example a full-ECG monitor in the form of a lightweight necklace. The ECG remains functional even when the wearer moves around, sending a full ECG reading to a base station that may be up to 10 meters away from the wearer.

Demonstrator ECG necklace with ultralow- power wireless radio. (Source: imec)