Cloud Manufacturing Based Embroidered Wearable Electronics For Daily ECG Monitoring

Abstract

Wearable electronics have been attracting significant attention in various applications such as consumer electronics, healthcare monitoring, localization and navigation and so on. The demand for advanced wearable electronics brings new challenges for the wearable technologies, which impose the limitations of the development of the current wearable electronics. The next generation of wearable electronics calls for special attention on several major challenges, which features more convenient, more energy-efficient and more precise sensing. In this dissertation, in order to tackle these challenges, three solutions are proposed and the application of ECG monitoring is selected as the validation of our solutions. For the convenience of the wearable ECG monitoring, we propose a new design and manufacturing approach for the embroidered textile circuits to achieve the fully flexible system integrated into cloth, which is called System-on-Cloth (SoCl). A prototype of embroidered ECG sensor is fabricated and tested based on the proposed approach. The testing results of the embroidered ECG sensor show that the cloud manufacturing platform can be considered as an effective tool for design and manufacturing the textile circuits based wearable electronics. For the energy efficiency of the ECG monitoring system, a new ECG signal compression method is proposed for the improvement of energy efficiency via reducing the energy consumption of wireless transmission. The simulation results of the ECG compression show that the new ECG compression method is promising to greatly improve the energy efficiency for the ECG monitoring system. For the precise ECG sensing, a new denoising method is developed to enable the high quality ECG sensing for the embroidered ECG sensor. The experimental results for the ECG denoising method present a better performance than the state of the art methods.