UC Irvine

Medical sensing system collect and analyze the patients’ physiological data for monitoring, aid or diagnostic purposes. System designers are faced with stringent requirements on not only correctness and safety but also power. Reference designs and multi-purpose platforms help to significantly shorten the development cycle.

This work takes a cross-layer, system-level, platform-based approach to addressing the problem of saving power in a class of portable medical system. We propose a low-power medical sensing system that can be used to monitor Electrocardiography (ECG), Photoplethysmogram (PPG), and muscle tension. It also includes a hand gesture recognition system to aid mobility-impaired patients.

We explore the theory and application of a compressive sensing framework to medical signal processing. A novel compressive sensing-based ECG compression algorithm and a dominant frequency extraction-based PPG heart-rate calculation algorithm are proposed to reduce the system power. The unique combination of hardware structure and software signal-processing algorithms makes low-power design possible. The system test results show that the proposed system is superior to existing works in terms of power consumption and system size.