ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the emerging low-power circuit design techniques and their applications in wearable healthcare monitoring systems. It includes various wearable sensors that are being used in healthcare monitoring. The chapter discusses methodologies for low-power operation and wireless telemetry of these wearable biomedical sensors. It also discusses the different sensor materials reported in literature, a few selected materials such as smart clothes, skin mimicking, flexible substrates, and soft silicone elastomers. A number of different types of wearable devices and systems for detection of human activity or monitoring of vital sign in advanced healthcare applications has been developed. Many of these systems are based on the evaluation of mechanical, thermal, or vision based data from the human body. The chapter emphasizes Impulse Radio Ultra-Wideband topology for wireless data transmission in the biomedical sensor system. It provides a brief concept of state-of-the-art energy-efficient sensor topologies with wearable and wireless properties for the application in healthcare monitoring.
