Evaluation of Analog vs. ASIC Input/Filter Stage for Multimodal Biopotential Wearable Sensor Data Acquisition

The current trends in wearable sensor technology suggest that, in the next decade or so, garments will commonly include some form of biometric/biopotential measurement system and will be of great value for gathering ambulatory metadata for remote diagnosis. In parallel, the introduction of new powerful mixed-signal devices will enhance the possibility of garments including cost-effective biopotential measurements, over the classical analog signal conditioning configurations. This paper presents the use of a recently introduced ASIC device (ADS1298) for measuring ECG, EEG and EMG data, towards developing a multimodal biopotential measurement system. Two programmable analog filter configurations are tested for comparison. The results show that adjusting the analog filters to accommodate different biopotentials is an unfeasible task in comparison with the ASIC device, which proved useful for measuring common biopotentials: ECG, EMG and EEG, and thus is more suitable for wearable sensor applications.