A 4-Channel Wearable Wireless Neural Recording

System
Moosung Chae, Kuanfu Chen, Wentai Liu, Jungsuk Kim, Mohanasankar Sivaprakasam
Integrated Bioelectronics Research Group
University of California at Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, USA
Abstract This paper presents a 4-channel wearable wireless
neural recording system that consists of wireless head stage,
receiver board, and user interface software. The wireless head
stage is implemented using a custom designed font-end IC for
bio potential amplification, filtering, and channel selection and a
commercial analog FM transmitter chip. Adjustable gain and
bandwidth of the channel allows the system to be used in
recording various neural signals. The size of the head stage is
1.55 1.725 0.5 and the weight is 20g. The power
consumption of the head stage is 28mW from two 1.55V button
cell batteries that allows continuous operation of at least 15
hours. The system was tested for ex-vivo and in-vivo
extracellular recordings from a dissected snail brain and a live
rat respectively.
I. INTRODUCTION
Neuroscientists employ neural recording systems to
monitor the behavior of live animals such as birds, reptiles,
rats, and primates. In those experiments, animals under testing
are usually anesthetized or bound by tethered wires, which
imposes a great limitation on the behavior being observed and
the information quality of the signals. Therefore a neural
recording system with wireless telemetry is preferred to the
one with wired outputs. Also, this particular system should be
as small as possible so that it is wearable by the animals. It is
also preferred to have the gain and bandwidth of the recording
channels variable to accommodate the dynamic range of the
signals.
Because low power consumption is one of the most critical
issues in this applications and wireless transmitter is usually
the most power consuming component in the system, the
choice of a suitable data transmitter is crucial. Digital
transmission, such as FSK and QFSK, are used in several
previous works [2-3], but under the same signal bandwidth, a
much higher carrier frequency is required to transmit digitized
data compared to analog modulations. Higher carrier
frequency tends to consume more power, which is not
desirable in battery powered neural recording system. For
example, the single channel neural recording system in [2]
consumes 130mW. Therefore, the analog transceiver has an
advantage over the digital one at the power consumption point
of view. Several previous neural recording systems choose
FM for data link [4-6]. [4], [5] use custom-designed FM
transmitter and [6] uses commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) FM
IC.
A recording system that meets all those requirements
mentioned is possible through a hybrid design method of
employing both COTS components and custom designed
subsystems [1]. In this paper, we present a 4-channel wearable
wireless neural recording system implemented using COTS
FM transceiver and custom front-end chip with adjustable
channel gain and bandwidth. The system architecture is
described in section II. Section III presents the design of the
custom designed front-end chip; Section IV presents the
testing result of the system; Section V presents the conclusion.
Figure 1. System architecture of the wireless neural recording system.
978-1-4244-1684-4/08/$25.00 2008 IEEE 1760
II. SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE
The Fig. 1 depicts the block diagram of proposed neural
recording system. The entire system can be separated into
three major parts: wireless head stage, receiver board,
software user interface. Neural signals from the subjects are
amplified and filtered by the custom IC. Then one selected
channel is connected to the FM transmitter through the control
signal supplied by the on-board switches. The 433MHz
frequency modulation (FM) signal is transmitted via an
antenna. At the receiver side, after demodulation, a low pass
filter is used to remove high frequency noise. Since the AC
output level of FM demodulator is only 400mV, an amplifier
is used before the signal is captured by the NI data acquisition
device, for PC display. A software user interface is
programmed with LabView to display and record the captured
data. Details of each part are described below.
A. Wireless Head Stage
The wireless head stage, as shown on the left of Fig. 2, can
record from 4 channels. Signals are amplified, filtered, and
selected through the custom-designed front-end IC. The
architecture and specifications of this IC are explained in
Section III. Since the neural signal is usually in the order of
microvolts, an operational amplifier (STMicroelectronics
TSV991) is used to achieve additional gain of 10. The small
package (SOT23-5, 2.8mm 2.9mm) makes TSV991 a good
choice for this application. To block DC current at the
amplifier output, an AC-coupling circuit is used between the
amplifier and the FM transmitter.
In this system a 433MHz Tx2 FM transmitter
(Radiometrix) with bandwidth of 90 KHz is used. It requires
only one external passive device, and it has a long
transmission distance (tens of meters in buildings) with
reasonable power consumption (9mA from 3.1V power
supply). The physical dimension, 32mm 12mm 3.8mm,
makes the transmitter the largest device on the head stage. The
size of the planar antenna (Linx Technology) is 28mm
13.7mm, which is similar to the FM transmitter. By stacking
the antenna on top of the transmitter, additional area for the
antenna is avoided.
Figure 2. Wireless head stage and receiver board (batteries at the back side).
The total power consumption of this wireless head stage is
28mW. It is powered by two button batteries on the back side
of the head stage. One 357 silver oxide button battery
(Energizer) provides the supply voltage level of 1.55V, and
has 175mAh capacity. The battery life time of this system is
longer than 15 hours and hence it is suitable for the
experiments monitoring neural activity over a long period of
time.
B. Receiver Board
The receiver (Fig. 2) consists of a 433MHz Rx2 FM
demodulator (Radiometrix) and an amplifier. Since the output
signal of the FM demodulator tends to have high frequency
noise, a low pass filter with cut-off frequency between 10
KHz to 50 KHz is applied to filter out the noise. According to
the specification of the FM demodulator, the full range AC
output level is only 400mV. To increase the amplitude a
1~10x variable gain amplifier is built using TSV991.
We employ NI-6009 data acquisition device (National
Instruments) as the interface between the receiver board and
PC due to its small size (63mm 85mm 23mm) and
compatibility with LabView software. Also, it can use the
power from USB cable to supply the 5V and 2.5V power to
the receiver board; so no external power supply is required.
The receiver board is designed to match the position of the
connectors on NI-6009 and it can be placeed on NI-6009
directly. NI-6009 has 14-bit high precision analog-digital
converter with up to 48 KHz sampling rate. However, the
voltage level of the signal fed into the ADC is smaller then the
ADC input full-range, so the equivalent precision is 10-bit.
The data captured by NI-6009 is fed to PC via USB2.0
interface.
C. User Interface Software
A user interface is designed to handle the data captured by
NI device using a LabView 8.4 (National Instruments), as
shown in Fig.3. This application software has several
functions. Lower waveform window displays all the recorded
data for a longer period of time. The upper waveform window
is for spike detection. The spike detection is achieved by a
user defined threshold voltage. Whenever the input signal is
higher than the threshold voltage, the graphic window
updates its value with the new spike waveform. This
application software can also record the input data.
Figure 3. User interface software.
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III. FRONT-END CHIP
Fig. 4 shows the block diagram and microphotograph of
the custom designed 4-channel front-end chip. It consists of
preamplifiers, an analog multiplexer, a 2
nd
amplifier, and an
output buffer. The entire signal path is fully differential to
eliminate the common mode noise. The preamplifier based on
[7] is composed of a gain-stage and an output stage to drive
the analog multiplexer. Fig. 5 shows the schematic of the
preamplifier and OTA. Because there is often DC open-circuit
potential at the electrode-electrolyte interface, the amplifier
should have large DC blocking capacitors at the input [7] and
this makes the preamplifier have large biasing resistors. The
biasing resistors are implemented using NMOS in
subthreshold region. The gate voltage for those NMOS, V
B
, is
provided by an on-board simple voltage divider with a
variable resistor and this enables adjustable low frequency
roll-off of the preamplifiers. Experimental results show that
this low-frequency roll-off can be adjusted from 0.01 Hz to
100 Hz. High frequency roll-off can be adjusted from 2 KHz
to 20 KHz in 16 steps by changing the load capacitance C
L
.
The gain of the preamplifier is determined by the ratio of the
two capacitors, C
1
/C
2
, and is set to 100.
A fully differential and self-biased operational
transconductance amplifier (OTA) is used in preamplifiers and
it enables the preamplifier to have common mode rejection
ratio (CMRR) of 90dB and power supply rejection ratio
(PSRR) of 80dB with input equivalent noise of 4.9V
rms
. The
input transistors are sized large enough to minimize the 1/f
noise. Each preamplifier draws only 2A and each buffer
draws 20.3A to drive the analog multiplexer. An analog
multiplexer connects one selected channel to the 2
nd
amplifier
by external control signals. The 2
nd
amplifier provides
additional gain of 7 to 10 also according to the external control
signals. The 2
nd
amplifier together with the output buffer
consumes 40.6A. The chip was fabricated in 0.35m CMOS
process. The die size of the front-end chip is 1.9mm 2.7mm
(core size is 1.5mm 1.0mm).
Figure 4. Block diagram of the custom designed front-end chip.
Figure 5. Schematic of the preamplifier and OTA used.
IV. TESTING RESULTS
The bench testing of the system was performed first and
Table I illustrates the performance of this system in
comparison with other previous works.
An ex-vivo recording using Helix Aspersa snail was done
to verify the proper operation of the system. In this experiment,
a snail was dissected, and extracelluar action potentials were
recorded successfully. Plastic suction electrode with an
uninsulated 0.01 diameter stainless-steel wire was used as a
recording electrode and an Ag-AgCl pellet ground electrode
was placed into saline as a reference electrode. In order to
record extracellular compound action potentials (CAPs), nerve
stumps were inserted into electrode tip and suction was
applied to obtain a tight seal. Fig. 6 shows the recorded signal.
The system was also used for in-vivo recording
experiments to record the extracellular action potentials from a
live rat. Fig. 7 shows the rat wearing the system with
electrodes connected. The system successfully recorded neural
signal for two days and part of the recorded signal is shown in
Fig. 8.
Figure 6. Recorded extracelluar action potentials from a disected snail brain.
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TABLE I. BENCH TEST RESULTS IN COMPARISON WITH OTHER WORKS
Publication [4] [5] [1] [6] [3] [2] This work
System
Weight 2.2g <1g 66g 3.1g(w/o batt.) - a few ounces 20g
Dimension (cm) 2.1x 2.1x 0.16 0.5 x 0.5 x 1 6.5 x 3.1 x 6 2.5 x 1 x 0.5 - 3.4 x 7.1 3.9 x 4.4 x 1.2
Power Consumption 2.05mW 5.8mW 50mW - - 130mW 28mW
Power Supply Level 1.5V - 3V 1.4V - 3.7V 1.55V
Amplifier
Channel # 7 1 1 2 4 8 4
Input-refered Noise 7.1Vrms - 3.12Vrms - - 5.94Vrms 5Vrms
Overall Gain 43.7dB 34dB 80dB - - 80dB 70dB
Technology 1.5m CMOS 0.35m CMOS 1.5m CMOS TI TLV2262 - 0.6m CMOS 0.35m CMOS
Data Telemetry
Telemetry FM with TDM FM IEEE 802.15 FM FSK with TDM QFSK FM
Frequency 94~98MHz 3.2GHz 2.4GHz 88~108MHz 433MHz 2.4GHz 433MHz
Telemetry Bandwidth 150KHz 10KHz 250Kbps 5KHz 9.6Kbps 250kbps 90KHz
Distance 0.5m <1m >20m Few m >50m 1.8m >10m
V. CONCLUSION
A wearable neural recording system with wireless
telemetry for monitoring live animal biopotentials was
presented in detail. This system amplifies the signal, filters,
transmits wirelessly, receives and stores in PC. The wireless
head stage was implemented using custom designed front-end
chip which has adjustable channel gain and bandwidth and
COTS FM transmitter chip. The wireless capability with small
power consumption and the minimal size and weight of the
head stage make this system suitable for monitoring the
behavior of live animals. The user-interface software enables
users to be able to monitor and store the waveforms for later
stage signal processing such as spike sorting and classification.
Figure 7. A live rat wearing the wireless recording system for in-vivo
extracellular recording from the brain
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank Jerry Tian and Jiping He of Arizona State
University for the rat experiments.
Figure 8. Recorded neural signal from the live rat in Fig .7.
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