Ultra low power SOC for portable health monitoring platforms

The use of portable health monitoring devices has re-shaped the conventional ”face-to-face” medical diagnostic mode for the patients. Most of these portable monitoring devices required low-energy, low-duty cycle hardware which help to detect various medical conditions of a patient, and transmit these information wired or wirelessly back to the medical personnel. The current offerings of such devices, consisting of using a standard micro-computer interfacing with high-end analog standard products and wireless modules are power consuming. Such a platform is not optimum in power usage and cost. In this paper, we present a System-On-Chip (SOC) silicon chip that has power aware capabilities and completes the need of a portable wireless health platform for monitoring various medical conditions of a patient. The power measurement results during idle and low power operation are shown, and has demonstrated that a health monitoring platform running on our SOC can have a standby time of 145,000 hours.