Front-End Electronics for Beta-Cell Function Monitoring with an Integrated FOPP Detector

This paper presents the front-end electronics for beta-cell function monitoring, which will be used for the study and treatment of the type 2 diabetes mellitus. A unique feature of the design is an integrated circuit solution for the Fraction of Plateau Phase (FOPP) detection. The FOPP is the percentage of time when beta-cells, in the islets of Langerhans in the pancreas, show burst activity, which is directly proportional to the extracellular glucose concentration. The proposed integrated FOPP detector circuit adopting a differential envelope detector structure keeps the design overhead to a minimum and only FOPP relevant information is well reserved and processed, resulting in a highly reduced data volume. This allows us to further apply this solution to more advanced invitro and in-vivo beta-cell activity monitoring. The concept is successfully validated by the measurement results of an application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) in XFAB XH018 CMOS process.