This book presents fundamental requirements, electrical specification, and parameter tradeoffs of wearable EEG acquisition circuits, especially those compatible with dry electrodes for user-friendly recordings. The authors introduce active electrode, the most promising solution for dry electrodes-based EEG measurement. This architectural concept has been combined with various, innovative circuit design techniques to illustrate structured IC design methodologies for high performance EEG recording. This book also gives examples on the design, implementation and evaluation of three generations of active electrode ICs.

Biopotential Readout Circuits for Portable Acquisition Systems describes one of the main building blocks of such miniaturized biomedical signal acquisition systems. The focus of this book is on the implementation of low-power and high-performance integrated circuit building blocks that can be used to extract biopotential signals from conventional biopotential electrodes. New instrumentation amplifier architectures are introduced and their design is described in detail. These amplifiers are used to implement complete acquisition demonstrator systems that are a stepping stone towards practical miniaturized and low-power systems.

Advances in technology have produced a range of on-body sensors and smartwatches that can be used to monitor a wearer’s health with the objective to keep the user healthy. However, the real potential of such devices not only lies in monitoring but also in interactive communication with expert-system-based cloud services to offer personalized and real-time healthcare advice that will enable the user to manage their health and, over time, to reduce expensive hospital admissions. To meet this goal, the research challenges for the next generation of wearable healthcare devices include the need to offer a wide range of sensing, computing, communication, and human–computer interaction methods, all within a tiny device with limited resources and electrical power. This Special Issue presents a collection of six papers on a wide range of research developments that highlight the specific challenges in creating the next generation of low-power wearable healthcare sensors.