• Journal of Sensor Science and Technology
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• v.13 no.6
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• pp.462-472
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• 2004

In this study, we measured the blood flow on arm by non-invasive method and implemented a system to measure variation of the blood flow by estimating bio-electrical impedance and arterial pressure according to cuff pressure. The implemented system measured impedance variation according to pressure variation applied by artificial cuff pressure on the measuring position. The system consisted of pressure measuring part and impedance measuring part using 4-electrode method. Pressure measuring part was composed of semiconductor pressure sensor and electronic circuit for signal processing of sensor output signal. In addition, impedance measuring part was composed of constant current source circuit and lock-in amplifier for detecting impedance signal. We conducted experiments of impedance measuring part using standard resistance for performance evaluation of the implemented system. In addition we experimented to estimate variation of the blood flow by measuring impedances of the experimental group. We estimated ratio of the blood flow resistance using mean arterial pressure and variation of the blood flow. As a result the ratio of the blood flow resistance and variation of blood flow were in an inverse relationship with each other and the correlation coefficient was -0.96776.

• Journal of Sensor Science and Technology
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• v.31 no.6
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• pp.411-417
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• 2022

In this paper, we propose a sensor with a C-shaped load cell to detect force change when a person sitting on the chair in an electrical transport-convenience vehicle is pushing ground by both heels. The load cell built in the vehicle is mechanically deformed by the vertical force owing to the human weight and the horizontal force by ground-pushing feet. The deformation rate of the load cell and its distribution are simulated using finite element analysis. In the simulation, the applied loads are preset in the range of 10 kg - 100 kg with a step size of 10 kg, and the ground-pushing force by feet is increased to 40 N with a step size of 5 N with respect to each applied load level. The resistance change of the load cell was observed to be linear in simulation as well as in measurement. the maximum difference between simulation and measurement was 0.89 % when the strain gauge constant was 2.243. The constant has a large influence on the difference. The proposed sensor was fabricated by connecting an instrument amplifier and a microcontroller to a load cell and used to detect the force by ground-pushing feet. To detect foot driving, the reference signal was set to 130% of the load, and the duration of the sensor output signal exceeding the reference signal was set to 0.6 s. In a test of a vehicle built with the proposed sensor, the footpushing force by the worker could be successfully detected even when the worker was working.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.29 no.6
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• pp.443-450
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• 2008

The purpose of this study is to measure both ECG and BCG(Ballistocariograph) signal of a subject on moving or resting wheelchair and detect the heart rate and respiratory rate and transmit an event message to remote server on emergent situation. To acquire ECG and BCG data, amplifier circuits were composed to be suitable for their characteristics. The output signals were converted to digital data and stored in bio-signal archiving media(SD card). CDMA module was used to transmit the event data on ECG electrode detachment and the received data was monitored by the developed C# application program. 5 volunteers participated in the experiment to evaluate the validity of the developed device. When the event occurs in each subject, 48 Kbyte data, stored for 32 seconds from that point, was transmitted to remote server through CDMA cellular phone network correctly. The received data of ECG, BCG, and 3-axial acceleration could be archived in server and the heart rate and respiratory rate could be measured and analyzed. The developed device in this study could acquire the ECG and BCG data of subjects on wheelchair simultaneously and measure their heart rate and respiratory rate. In addition, event data was verified to be transmitted to remote server without any errors.

• Journal of IKEEE
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• v.22 no.4
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• pp.1025-1030
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• 2018

The proposed modulator is designed by utilizing a conventional structure employing time division technique to realize the 4th order delta-sigma modulator using one op-amp. In order to reduce the influence of KT/C noise, the capacitance in the first and second integrators reused was chosen to be 20pF and capacitance of third and fourth integrators was designed to be 1pF. The stage variable technique in the low power reconfigurable op-amp was used to solve the stability issue due to different capacitance loads for the reduction of KT/C noise. This technique enabled the proposed modulator to reduce the power consumption of 15% with respect to the conventional one. The proposed modulator was fabricated with 0.18um CMOS N-well 1 poly 6 metal process and consumes 305uW at supply voltage of 1.8V. The measurement results demonstrated that SNDR, ENOB, DR, FoM(Walden), and FoM(Schreier) were 66.3 dB, 10.6 bits, 83 dB, 98 pJ/step, and 142.8 dB at the sampling frequency of 256kHz, oversampling ratio of 128, clock frequency of 1.024 MHz, and input frequency of 250 Hz, respectively.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.269-275
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• 2004

Different biological tissues have different values of electrical resistivity. In EIT (electrical impedance tomography), we try to provide cross-sectional images of a resistivity distribution inside an electrically conducting subject such as the human body mainly for functional imaging. However, it is well known that the image reconstruction problem in EIT is ill-posed and the quality of a reconstructed image highly depends on the measurement error. This requires us to develop a high-performance EIT system. In this paper, we describe the development of a 16-channel digital EIT system including a single constant current source, 16 voltmeters, main controller, and PC. The system was designed and implemented using the FPGA-based digital technology. The current source injects 50KHz sinusoidal current with the THD (total harmonic distortion) of 0.0029% and amplitude stability of 0.022%. The single current source and switching circuit reduce the measurement error associated with imperfect matching of multiple current sources at the expense of a reduced data acquisition time. The digital voltmeter measuring the induced boundary voltage consists of a differential amplifier, ADC, and FPGA (field programmable gate array). The digital phase-sensitive demodulation technique was implemented in the voltmeter to maximize the SNR (signal-to-noise ratio). Experimental results of 16-channel digital voltmeters showed the SNR of 90dB. We used the developed EIT system to reconstruct resistivity images of a saline phantom containing banana objects. Based on the results, we suggest future improvements for a 64-channel muff-frequency EIT system for three-dimensional dynamic imaging of bio-impedance distributions inside the human body.