Wearable Autonomous Wireless Electro-encephalography System Fully Powered by Human Body Heat

Abstract

A wearable, wireless 2-channel electro-encephalography (EEG) system has been realized which functions fully autonomously, without any batteries. It is fully powered by human body heat using a thermo-electric generator which can produce over 2 mW at 23degC. It uses two of IMECpsilas ultra-low power biopotential electronics chips to record high-quality EEG signals. The whole system consumes only 0.8 mW, while sampling and transmitting 2 channels of 12-bit EEG data continuously at 256 Hz. Previous work has shown body-heat powered sensors such as a wireless temperature sensor or pulse oximeter with a low transmission duty cycle, but never before a continuously acquiring and transmitting system with complete power autonomy has been demonstrated.