A wireless, compact, and scalable bioimpedance measurement system for energy-efficient multichannel body sensor solutions

In this paper, we present the design, realization and evaluation of a multichannel measurement system based on a cost-effective high-performance integrated circuit for electrical bioimpedance (EBI) measurements in the frequency range from 1 kHz to 1 MHz, and a low-cost commercially available radio frequency transceiver device, which provides reliable wireless communication. The resulting on-chip spectrometer provides high measuring EBI capabilities and constitutes the basic node to built EBI wireless sensor networks (EBI-WSNs). The proposed EBI-WSN behaves as a high-performance wireless multichannel EBI spectrometer where the number of nodes, i.e., number of channels, is completely scalable to satisfy specific requirements of body sensor networks. One of its main advantages is its versatility, since each EBI node is independently configurable and capable of working simultaneously. A prototype of the EBI node leads to a very small printed circuit board of approximately 8 cm2 including chip-antenna, which can operate several years on one 3-V coin cell battery. A specifically tailored graphical user interface (GUI) for EBI-WSN has been also designed and implemented in order to configure the operation of EBI nodes and the network topology. EBI analysis parameters, e.g., single-frequency or spectroscopy, time interval, analysis by EBI events, frequency and amplitude ranges of the excitation current, etc., are defined by the GUI.