Photoplethysmography is a non-invasive sensing technique which infers instantaneous
cardiac function from an optical measurement of blood vessels. This
thesis presents a photoplethysmography based sensor system that has been developed
speci fically for the requirements of a pervasive healthcare monitoring
system. Continuous monitoring of patients requires both the size and power
consumption of the chosen sensor solution to be minimised to ensure the patients
will be willing to use the device. Pervasive sensing also requires that
the device be scalable for manufacturing in high volume at a build cost that
healthcare providers are willing to accept. System level choice of both electronic
circuits and signal processing techniques are based on their sensitivity to
cardiac biosignals, robustness against noise inducing artefacts and simplicity
of implementation. Numerical analysis is used to justify the implementation
of a technique in hardware. Circuit prototyping and experimental data collection
is used to validate a technique's application. The entire signal chain
operates in the discrete-time domain which allows all of the signal processing
to be implemented in firmware on an embedded processor which minimised the
number of discrete components while optimising the trade-off between power
and bandwidth in the analogue front-end. Synchronisation of the optical illumination
and detection modules enables high dynamic range rejection of both
AC and DC independent light sources without compromising the biosignal.
Signal delineation is used to reduce the required communication bandwidth as
it preserves both amplitude and temporal resolution of the non-stationary photoplethysmography
signals allowing more complicated analytical techniques to
be performed at the other end of communication channel. The complete sensing
system is implemented on a single PCB using only commercial-off -the-shelf
components and consumes less than 7.5mW of power. The sensor platform
is validated by the successful capture of physiological data in a harsh optical
sensing environment
