Research & development - Leuven | More than two weeks ago
Wearable electronics are becoming popular, making personal health care devices like chest patches, wristbands, and smartwatches a reality. These devices can measure signal modalities like ECG, BioZ, EEG, and PPG, which monitor different health parameters, such as heart rate (HR), heart rate variability (HRV), blood pressure, and much more. It plays a vital role in fitness monitoring nowadays and even in clinical diagnosing and monitoring. Wearable PPG is one of the most important modalities. Besides HR and HRV, from the dual-wavelength PPG measurement, the oxygen saturation levels (SpO2) can be derived as well.
The wearable chest PPG monitoring is rather more interesting because it not only measures the HR, HRV as a standard chest ECG patch does, but it also provides SpO2, and respiration at the same time. SpO2 usually gets measured by a dedicated PPG finger clip. All these biomedical parameters can be extracted with a single setup on the chest, aiming to diagnose or monitor lung diseases. For example, we are suffering the covid-19 pandemic, and chest PPG is a promising application for covid-19 patients. Currently, we developed and characterized our 1st chest PPG chip. However, the chest PPG patch still needed to be designed to enable the in-vivo, ambulatory chest PPG measurement. Further signal processing and analysis are also required to validate the chest PPG chip fully.
This internship project aims to design a suitable, small form factor chest patch (demonstrator) with real-time signal processing. The student will be involved in the hardware design, in-vivo, real-time chest PPG recording, and the relevant signal processing.
Specific objectives:
Requirements:
Type of project: Internship
Duration: 9 months
Required degree: Master of Science, Master of Engineering Science
Required background: Electrotechnics/Electrical Engineering
Supervising scientist(s): For further information or for application, please contact: Qiuyang Lin (Qiuyang.Lin@imec.be) and Dwaipayan Biswas (Dwaipayan.Biswas@imec.be) and Sergio Fernandez Santos (Sergio.FernandezSantos@imec.be)
Imec allowance will be provided for students studying at a non-Belgian university.