A Wireless Multimodal Physiological Monitoring ASIC for Animal Health Monitoring Injectable Devices

Abstract

Utilizing injectable devices for monitoring animal health offers several advantages over traditional wearable devices, including improved signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and enhanced immunity to motion artifacts. We present a wireless application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) for injectable devices. The ASIC has multiple physiological sensing modalities including body temperature monitoring, electrocardiography (ECG), and photoplethysmography (PPG). The ASIC fabricated using the CMOS 180 nm process is sized to fit into an injectable microchip implant. The ASIC features a low-power design, drawing an average DC power of 155.3 µW, enabling the ASIC to be wirelessly powered through an inductive link. To capture the ECG signal, we designed the ECG analog frontend (AFE) with 0.3 Hz low cut-off frequency and 45-79 dB adjustable midband gain. To measure PPG, we employ an energy-efficient and safe switched-capacitor-based (SC) light emitting diode (LED) driver to illuminate an LED with milliampere-level current pulses. A SC integrator-based AFE converts the current of photodiode with a programmable transimpedance gain. A resistor-based Wheatstone Bridge (WhB) temperature sensor followed by an instrumentation amplifier (IA) provides 27–47 °C sensing range with 0.02 °C inaccuracy. Recorded physiological signals are sequentially sampled and quantized by a 10-bit analog-to-digital converter (ADC) with the successive approximation register (SAR) architecture. The SAR ADC features an energy-efficient switching scheme and achieves a 57.5 dB signal-to-noise-and-distortion ratio (SNDR) within 1 kHz bandwidth. Then, a back data telemetry transmits the baseband data via a backscatter scheme with intermediate-frequency assistance. The ASIC’s overall functionality and performance has been evaluated through an in vivo experiment.