Direct Digital Sensing Potentiostat targeting Body-Dust

In this paper, an innovative Direct Digital Sensing Potentiostat integrated circuit for enzymeless blood glucose sensing and direct digitization is proposed to address the requirements of Body Dust. The circuit occupies a silicon area of 460 μm2 in 180nm CMOS and operates down to 0.4V power supply voltage with 4.7nW power consumption. The functionality of the proposed circuit and its performance under typical conditions and under process and temperature variations is tested by post-layout simulations

Optimized Sampling Rate for Voltammetry-Based Electrochemical Sensing in Wearable and IoT Applications

The recent advancements in electrochemical measurements are guiding the development of new platforms for in-situ point-of-care monitoring of human-metabolite, markers and drugs. Despite this, the application of Voltammetry-Based Sensing (VBS) techniques is still limited in wearable, portable, or IoT systems. In order to use VBS approaches to measure analytes in small and low-power electronic platforms for diagnostics, several improvements are required. For example, the definition of a method to achieve the right trade-off between sample rate and sensing performance is still missing. To develop a method to define the best sampling rate, we present here an extensive analysis of experimental data to prove that is feasible to detect drugs such as paracetamol by Staircase Cyclic Voltammetry (SCV) or Differential Pulse Voltammetry (DVP) direct detection methods, with low sampling frequency. Our results prove that the proposed method helps the development of systems capable of discriminating the minimum pharmacology concentration of the metabolite under analysis with a massive reduction of the sampling frequency

ZnCr2-xFexO4 Nanoparticles-Modified Electrochemical Sensors: A Comparative Study

This work presents the ZnCr2- x FexO4 (x = 1, 1.25, 1.5, 1.75, 2) nanomaterials modified screen-printed carbon-based electrochemical sensors. The electrochemical sensor's performance was studied towards paracetamol sensing. The sensitivity and kinetic rate constant were evaluated for each sensor and compared. Found that the sensitivity and kinetic rate constant decreased as the amount of Cr decreased from x = 1 to 1.75. The best sensitivity and kinetic rate constant were observed for the pure ferrite sensor (x = 2)

Quasi-Digital Biosensor-Interface for a Portable Pen to Monitor Anaesthetics Delivery

Monitoring of patient response to the anaesthetic drugs is an attractive improvement for achieving a correct balance of sedation level, increasing the chance of success in the right procedure of anaesthesia. Nowadays, there are no commercial tools able to offer real-time monitoring of anaesthetics, indeed, there is still a lack in sensing technologies able to maintain high performances in long term monitoring within a portable miniaturised hardware system. To overcome these limitations, we are here presenting the innovative concept of a portable pen-device able to sense anaesthetic compounds over time. This study is based on an electrochemical sensor to be fully integrated into a complete pen-shaped point-of-care for the monitoringof anaesthesia delivery. The design of the system is based on a bio-inspired event-based approach that is guaranteeing low complexity, low power consumption and is therefore suitable to be scaled to fit the barrel of a pen. An exhaustive comparison between the proposed system and a lab instrument proves that the presented approach obtains comparable performances in terms of sensitivity and resolution with the ones obtained by expensive commercial instrumentation, meanwhile, the results show a 95 % power consumption reduction and a 92 % area decrease w.r.t. previously presented implementation

Nanostructured Bismuth Electrodes for Non-Enzymatic Paracetamol Sensing: Development, Testing, and Computational Approach

In this work, new Screen Printed Carbon-paste Electrodes (SPCEs) were developed through deposition of nanostructures of HO–BiONO3 synthesized with or without surfactant additions. We performed a cyclic voltammetry study showing the improvement in performance of bismuth tailored electrodes for paracetamol sensing compared with bare SPCE. A computation study was also performed for investigating the interaction between paracetamol and bismuth species during the electron transfer process enlighten the preferential sites of interaction on the surface of modified SPEs

Ultra-Miniaturised CMOS Current Driver for Wireless Biphasic Intracortical Microstimulation

This work shows an ultra-miniaturised and ultralow-power CMOS current driver for biphasic intracortical microstimulation. The CMOS driver is composed of a leakage-based voltage-to-current converter and an H-bridge circuit providing biphasic charge-balanced current stimulation. The circuit has been simulated, fabricated and tested. The current driver consumes 1.87 µW with a supply voltage of 1.8 V, and it occupies a silicon area of 15×12.4 µm 2 . The driver works in linearity in the current range between 23−92 µ