A Multisensor Mobile Interface for Industrial Environment and Healthcare Monitoring

Abstract

This work presents a reconfigurable multi-sensor mobile interface architecture that is applicable to heterogeneous sensor applications and also easy to generate new types of combined services. The multi-sensor interface attributes compactness and flexibility to reconfigurable readout integrated circuits (ROICs) and migration of signal processing and computation burdens from a sensor tag to a smartphone. Two reconfigurable ROICs which were designed and fabricated in a 0.18-m CMOS process generate raw digital data from environmental and healthcare sensors. Their detected raw data are wirelessly sent to the smartphone where real-time calibration and post-processing are performed optimally for each sensor. In an application to industrial systems, an in-vehicle system prototype supporting combined monitoring services of air-quality and healthcare was integrated into a steering wheel cover and experimentally verified to provide real-time measurement of three environmental sensor signals and two healthcare physiological signals with the results displayed on a smartphone.