5th International Symposium on Medical Information and Communication Technology (ISMICT-2011, Montreux)

5th International Symposium on Medical Information and Communication Technology

Tutorials

Tutorial 1 – Medical BAN technology and devices

Chair Prof. Dr. Sandro Carrara, EPFL

Lecture 1.1 – Biosensing on chips by Prof. Dr. Carlotta Guiducci, EPFL, Switzerland
Lecture 1.2 – Towards Smart and Energy-Aware Wireless Body Sensor Networks for Personal Health Monitoring by Prof. Dr. Nadia Khaled, EPFL, Switzerland
Lecture 1.3 – Biomedical Circuits: Parallel Brain-Computer Interfaces for Biosensing and Subsequent Treatment of Neural Dysfunctions by Prof. Dr. Mohamad Sawan, Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal, Canada
Lecture 1.4 – Wearable Body Area Network: Towards Preemptive and Proactive Healthcare Applications by Dr. Jerald Yoo, Masdar Institute, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

Lecture 1.1 – Biosensing on chips by Prof. Dr. Carlotta Guiducci, EPFL, Switzerland

Carlotta Guiducci holds her PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Bologna (I). She was a postdoc at the Nanobiophysics Lab at Ecole Supérieure de Physique et Chimie Industrielles Paris (F) between 2005 and 2007. Later at University of Bologna she led a joint research group of electrical engineers, physicists and biologists funded by an Integrated Project of The EU (DiNamICS) and by national projects. She recently joined the Institute of Bioengineering at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (CH) where she holds a position as Tenure-Track Assistant Professor.
Her research activity spans from the characterization of MOS in quantic regime to the development of novel techniques for sensing biological aﬃnity reactions on surfaces by means of semiconductor sensors and electronic transducers. She developed in collaboration with Inﬁneon technologies two test chips for DNA detection by capacitance measurements. She has been working on electrical, electrochemical and optical techniques. She demonstrated and patented the measurement of DNA by UV absorption on non volatile memory cells.
Her laboratory team is focused on the design and application of electronic biosensors and is at the forefront of electronic engineering and bioengineering. The sensors address a wide range of applications, from nucleic acid, protein and drug detection to the measurements of bacterial metabolism and they are based on detection principles supporting electronic transduction, in order to couple directly and integrate the sensors themselves with electronic circuitry for data acquisition.

The interface between electronic circuits and life sciences will be one of the focal points of future integrated system design. Several solutions for electronic devices/biological matter interactions are already available and they have proved their potential to be highly-portable systems or high-throughput systems or both. In this talk, we will address the paradigm of electronic sensors, circuits and systems as privileged means to interact with biological matter at the higher level of detail while bringing the advantage of almost unlimited choice of signal processing, storing and communication solutions. Sensing principles will be presented in a physics and biophysics perspective. High-throughput and integration will be addressed with respect to tradeoffs between high density and signal measurability.

The talk will also tackle the compatibility issues of biochemical processes and solid-state technologies and will describe the different possibilities for developing and scale molecular sensing sites on a chip.

Lecture 1.2 – Towards Smart and Energy-Aware Wireless Body Sensor Networks for Personal Health Monitoring by Prof. Dr. Nadia Khaled, EPFL, Switzerland

Nadia Khaled received the M.Sc. degree in electrical engineering from ENSEEIHT, Toulouse, France, in 2000, and the Ph. D. in applied sciences from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, in 2005. From 2000 to 2005, she was with the wireless research group of the Interuniversity Microelectronics Center (IMEC), Leuven, Belgium. From 2005 to 2006, she was a postdoctoral researcher at ETH Zurich, Switzerland. Since 2006, she has been a postdoctoral researcher at EPFL, and has held the position of visiting assistant professor at the University of Carlos III Madrid (UC3M) from 2006 to 2009. As of January 2010, Nadia is leading a joint NESTLE-EPFL project on non-intrusive, intelligent and wearable sensors to help monitoring the health, well-being and nutrition of the elderly.

Recent advances in microelectronics have gone a long way towards the miniaturization and power efficiency of processing elements, radio transceivers and sensing elements of a large array of physiological phenomena. It has thus become plausible to realize the low cost, low power, miniaturized, yet, smart sensor nodes needed to enable wearable personal health monitoring systems. These sensor nodes should be able to sense various physiological quantities, process and communicate sensor data with on-body or remote base stations. They should also be able to organize in a wireless body-area sensor network (WBSN) to achieve an integrated monitoring capability. The inherent resource-constrained nature of these systems, coupled with the harsh operating conditions and stringent autonomy requirements, pose important design challenges. And, although several sensor platforms have been recently proposed to address some of these challenges, much remains to be done in terms of functionality, power efficiency and miniaturization.

This talk reviews state-of-the-art WBSN platforms for personal health monitoring systems, and discusses their main design challenges. In particular, it highlights the unsustainable energy cost incurred by the straightforward wireless streaming of raw sensor data. To achieve the extended autonomy required by ambulatory monitoring, this tutorial advocates enabling more embedded intelligence onboard these sensors. To illustrate the effectiveness of this approach, it focuses on electrocardiogram (ECG) monitoring applications. After analyzing the requirements of these applications in terms of wireless communications and local signal processing, recent advances in efficient mapping of ECG signal processing algorithms on state-of-the-art sensor nodes are discussed. These algorithms range from simple heart rate estimation to advanced compression and feature extraction. It is then shown that such advanced embedded intelligence actually translates into a reduction in the node’s energy consumption, and accordingly into an extension of its battery lifetime. Finally, the tutorial is concluded with two WBSN demonstrations: (1) a real-time compressed sensing-based personal ECG monitoring system and (2) a real-time personal ECG delineation system (See video at http://esl.epfl.ch/cms/lang/en/pid/42817).

Lecture 1.3 – Biomedical Circuits: Parallel Brain-Computer Interfaces for Biosensing and Subsequent Treatment of Neural Dysfunctions by Prof. Dr. Mohamad Sawan, Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal, Canada

Mohamad Sawan received the Ph.D. degree in 1990 in electrical engineering, from Sherbrooke University, Canada. He joined Polytechnique Montréal in 1991, where he is currently a Professor of Microelectronics and Biomedical Engineering. His scientific interests are the design and test of mixed-signal (analog, digital, RF, MEMS and optic) circuits and Microsystems: design, integration, assembly and validations. These topics are oriented toward the biomedical and telecommunications applications.
Dr. Sawan is a holder of a Canada Research Chair in Smart Medical Devices. He is founder director of the Polystim Neurotechnologies Laboratory at Polytechnique Montréal, and he is leading the Microsystems Strategic Alliance of Quebec (ReSMiQ) receiving membership support from 11 Universities.
He is founder / co-founder of several International conferences such as NEWCAS, BiOCAS, and ICECS, and he is Editor/ Associate Editor of several International Journals such as the IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Circuits and Systems and the Springer Mixed-signal Letters. Dr. Sawan published more than 450 papers in peer reviewed journals and conference proceedings, offered more than 100 invited talks/keynotes, and he was awarded 6 patents pertaining to the field of biomedical sensors and actuators.
Dr. Sawan received several prestigious awards; the most important of them are the Medal of Honor from the President of Lebanon, the Bombardier Award for technology transfer, the Barbara Turnbull Award for medical research in Canada, and the achievement Award from the American University of Science and Technology. Dr. Sawan is Fellow of the IEEE, Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering, Fellow of the Engineering Institute of Canada, and Officer of the Quebec’s National Order.

Emerging brain-computer Interfaces dedicated for biosensing and treatment applications are promising alternative for learning about the intracortical organization, studying the neural activity underlying cognitive functions and pathologies, locating onset seizures, understanding neurons interactions, detecting mind-driven decisions, address complex central neural system dysfunctions by both microelectrostimulation and drug delivery Microsystems. This talk covers circuits and systems techniques used for the design and integration of biosensing and treatment Microsystems. Such devices are fully implantable, interconnected to intracortical neural tissues, and include wireless links used to power up such implanted devices and bidirectionally exchange data with external base station. Global view of typical devices altogether with corresponding multidimensional challenges such power management and high-data rate communication modules will be described. Special attention will be paid to present digital and analog circuit techniques dedicated to parallel detecting and recording of action potentials and seizures through large arrays of electrodes. On the other hand, microstimulation in the primary visual cortex, which are intended to recover vision for the blind through multisite large arrays of electrodes, will be summarized as case study of the intended treatments.

Lecture 1.4 – Wearable Body Area Network: Towards Preemptive and Proactive Healthcare Applications by Dr. Jerald Yoo, Masdar Institute, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

Jerald Yoo received the B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Department of Electrical Engineering from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Daejeon, Korea, in 2002, 2007, and 2010, respectively. In May 2010, he joined the faculty of Microsystems Engineering, Masdar Institute, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, where he is an assistant professor. He is currently also with Technology and Development Program, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA, USA, as a visiting scholar. He developed low-energy Body Area Network (BAN) transceivers and wearable body sensor network using Planar-Fashionable Circuit Board (P-FCB) for continuous health monitoring system. His research focuses on low energy circuit technology for wearable bio signal sensors, wireless power transmission, SoC design to system realization for wearable healthcare applications, and energy-efficient biomedical circuit techniques. He is an author of a book chapter in Biomedical CMOS ICs (Springer, 2010). Dr. Yoo is a co-recipient of the Asian Solid-State Circuits Conference (A-SSCC) Outstanding Design Awards in 2005.

Healthcare application is a promising sector for semiconductor industry. Currently, chronic diseases account for over 1/3 of deaths around the world. To mitigate the impact of the diseases, healthcare paradigm is now shifting from reactive illness management towards proactive and preemptive health management; the goal here is to maintain healthy life in the first place, or prevent illness from getting any worse by continuously monitoring health during normal daily life.