Ultra-Low Power Inertial MEMS for Pervasive Wearable Computing

项目目标简述：该项目为可穿戴计算机提供超低功耗加速度计和陀螺仪，延长电池寿命。摘要：非技术技术的进步导致了可穿戴传感、计算和通信设备的发展，在包括健康和医疗保健在内的多个领域实现了各种各样的新应用。监测人体运动和运动功能可能被认为是最重要的应用之一。尽管这些系统具有影响我们生活的巨大潜力，但要成为现实还面临许多障碍。启用传感器通常需要大量的能量，需要大容量的电池。这给进一步小型化带来了挑战。本研究的目标是使可穿戴计算机的超低功耗传感器和DSP以非常小的功耗预算运行，从而实现数周或数月的电池寿命。这项拟议中的研究将在医疗保健和健康领域得到广泛应用，包括步态分析、预防跌倒和监测体育锻炼。该项目将大大减少可穿戴计算机的尺寸和重量，使许多无处不在的健康监测应用成为可能。它可以极大地提高健康监测实践和医学研究的质量，使更多目前不可行的应用得以实现。这个项目的目标是一个非常重要的医疗保健应用，步态监测。考虑到可穿戴式步态监测应用的重要性，以及我们在减少传感器尺寸方面所做的努力，半导体公司将为可穿戴式计算机生产数十亿芯片。该研究利用新颖的机电设计和最先进的微加工技术来制造整体尺寸在数百微米到几毫米之间的接触式（全或隧穿式）惯性传感器。这样的设备基本上由许多加速开关组成，需要大约1V的小偏置电压，并且没有稳定的电流流来操作。传感器的输出通过连接/断开偏置电压到设备输出电极来打开/关闭，这取决于设备观察到的加速度和/或旋转速率。这与现有的惯性传感器相反，惯性传感器提供模拟输出，需要在模拟域中进行大量的进一步处理，功率预算为1mW，这是瓶颈。所提出的新型设备可以直接与数字读出/控制电子设备接口。提出的研究还将实现一套新的方法，通过实时控制传感器的采样频率和位分辨率，共同执行信号处理并优化传感器和数字电路的功率。拟议的研究将在一个重要的健康监测应用的背景下得到验证：使用腕带和鞋穿传感器进行步态分析。

Ultra-Low Power Inertial MEMS for Pervasive Wearable ComputingBrief description of project Goals:The project enables ultra-low power accelerometers and gyroscopes for wearable computers with prolonged battery lifetime.Abstract:Nontechnical Advances in technology have led to the development of wearable sensing, computing and communication devices, enabling a large variety of new applications in several domains, including wellness and health care. Monitoring human movements and motor functions perhaps is considered one of the most important applications. Despite their tremendous potential to impact our lives, such systems face a number of hurdles to become a reality. The enabling sensors often demand a large amount of energy, requiring sizable batteries. This creates challenges for further miniaturization. The goal of this research is to enable ultra-low power sensors and DSP's for wearable computers operating with a very small power budget enabling weeks and months of battery lifetime. The proposed research will empower a large set of applications in health care and wellness domains including gait analysis, fall prevention and monitoring physical exercise. This project will ideally reduce the size and weight of wearable computers significantly, enabling many ubiquitous health monitoring applications. It can dramatically improve the quality of health monitoring practice and medical research, empowering more applications that are not currently feasible. This project targets a very important health care application for gait monitoring. Considering the importance of wearable gait monitoring applications and our efforts in reducing the form factor of the sensors that will justify their true ubiquitous use, semiconductor companies will produce billions of chips for wearable computers.TechnicalThe proposed research takes advantage of novel electromechanical designs and state of the art micromachining technologies to fabricate contact-based (full or tunneling) inertial sensors with overall dimensions in the hundreds of microns to a few millimeters. Such devices are essentially comprised of a number of acceleration switches requiring a small bias voltage of around 1V and no steady current flow to operate. The output of the sensor is turned ON/OFF by connecting/disconnecting the bias voltage to the device output electrode depending on the accelerations and/or rotation rates the device observes. This is contrary to the existing inertial sensors that provide an analog output requiring significant further processing in the analog domain with a power budget of 1mW which turns out to be the bottleneck. The proposed new class of devices can be directly interfaced with digital readout/control electronics. The proposed research will also enable a new set of methodologies that co-jointly perform the signal processing and optimize the power of sensors and digital circuitry by controlling the sampling frequency and bit resolution of sensors in real-time. The proposed research will be validated in the context of an important health monitoring application: gait analysis using wrist-worn and shoe-worn sensors.