News Release
What is the Story Behind the Research Expo Gold Squares?
| on April 18 features a 200+ graduate student poster session, ten-minute faculty talks and a networking reception. |
San Diego, CA, March 11, 2013 -- The gold squares on the Research Expo 2013 postcards…what are they?
The gold squares are ceramic packages that house experimental circuits developed in the lab of bioengineering professor Gert Cauwenberghs at the Â鶹´«Ã½ Jacobs School of Engineering. The research is aimed at developing new circuits that increase the speed and decrease the energy required to wirelessly transfer biological data—such as ECG signals from the heart and EEG signals from the brain—from sensors worn on the body to nearby data collectors.
Developing new kinds of circuits that transmit data quickly and efficiently is of interest because wireless data transmission is a large part of the overall energy budget for small wearable sensors. Reducing energy requirements means sensor batteries can shrink, which is especially important for sensors worn on the human body, explained postdoctoral researcher Christoph Maier from Cauwenberghs’ lab in the Department of Bioengineering at Â鶹´«Ã½.
This work on rapid, energy-efficient data transfer from biological sensors to nearby monitors complements research on “contact-free” sensors that collect biological data from the heart and brain without coming into direct contact with the skin. If contact-free sensors are bogged down by bulky batteries, they are not going to be comfortable to wear. (For research related to contact-free sensors, electrical engineering Ph.D. student Mike Chi won best bioengineering poster award at Research Expo 2011. See below for more.)
Circuits Embedded in Fabrics
The circuits in the gold ceramic packages interface with conformal flexible antennas that—if the technology were to mature—would allow circuits to be integrated directly into wearable fabrics or even under the skin, Cauwenberghs explained.
The idea: if you stretch or bend the antenna, your wireless transmission frequency will still be locked in.
“That’s the key contribution of this chip,” said Cauwenberghs, “It’s an adaptive frequency locking transmitter, on a very fast time scale.”
The researchers published a technical description of this circuit in a paper presented at the conference “ESSCIRC 2012” last fall.
The ESSCIRC 2012 paper: “,” by Tuan-Vu Cao*, Christoph Maier**, Dag Wisland*, Tor Sverre Lande*, Gert Cauwenberghs**.
*Nanoelectronics group, Department of Informatics, University of Oslo
**Department of Bioengineering and Institute for Neural Computation, Â鶹´«Ã½
Research Expo Ties
In 2011, Mike Chi, from Cauwenberghs’ lab, won the Best Bioengineering Poster Award at for research on a custom chip for sensors that detect electrical signals from the body without direct skin contact and act as extremely sensitive amplifiers. After working with theat the Jacaobs School, Chi and Cauwenberghs went on to co-found the start-up company , which is developing state-of-the-art dry sensors for EEG and ECG monitoring..
In the meantime, the research continues in the Cauwenberghs' lab. Graduate students from his lab that will present posters at Research Expo 2013 are listed below.
See the full list of .
Students: Jongkil Park | Theodore Yu | Siddharth Joshi | Neftci Emre | Christoph Maier
Professor: Gert Cauwenberghs
Students: Bruno Umbria Pedroni | Srinjoy Das | Emre Neftci
Professors: Gert Cauwenberghs | Kenneth Kreutz-Delgado
Industry Application Areas: Life Sciences/Medical Devices & Instruments | Semiconductor | Software, Analytics
Students: Abraham Akinin, Nikhil Govil
Professors: Howard Poizner, Samuel Ward, John Iversen, Gert Cauwenberghs
Industry Application Areas: Control Systems | Life Sciences/Medical Devices & Instruments
Students: Sohmyung Ha | Jongkil Park
Professor: Gert Cauwenberghs
Industry Application Areas: Electronics/Photonics | Life Sciences/Medical Devices & Instruments | Neuroengineering
Students: Siddharth Joshi | Kevin Young | Sohmyung Ha | Christoph Maier
Professor: Gert Cauwenberghs
Industry Application Areas: Internet, Networking, Systems | Semiconductor | Circuits and Systems
Media Contacts
Daniel Kane
Jacobs School of Engineering
858-534-3262
dbkane@ucsd.edu