A Portable and a Scalable Multi-Channel Wireless Recording System for Wearable Electromyometrial Imaging

Electromyometrial imaging (EMMI) technology has emerged as one of the promising technology that can be used for non-invasive pregnancy risk stratification and for preventing complications due to pre-term birth. Current EMMI systems are bulky and require a tethered connection to desktop instrumentation, as a result, the system cannot be used in non-clinical and ambulatory settings. In this article, we propose an approach for designing a scalable, portable wireless EMMI recording system that can be used for in-home and remote monitoring. The wearable system uses a non-equilibrium differential electrode multiplexing approach to enhance signal acquisition bandwidth and to reduce the artifacts due to electrode drifts, amplifier 1/f noise, and bio-potential amplifier saturation. A combination of active shielding, a passive filter network, and a high-end instrumentation amplifier ensures sufficient input dynamic range (>100 dB) such that the system can simultaneously acquire different bio-potential signals like maternal electrocardiogram (ECG) in addition to the EMMI electromyogram (EMG) signals. We show that the switching artifacts and the channel cross-talk introduced due to non-equilibrium sampling can be reduced using a compensation technique. This enables the system to be potentially scaled to a large number of channels without significantly increasing the system power dissipation. We demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach in a clinical setting using an 8-channel battery-powered prototype which dissipates less than 8 μ W per channel for a signal bandwidth of 1 KHz.