There was a very interesting lecture from dr. Firat Yazicioglu yesterday. This lecture, entitled Analog Signal Processing for Bio-Medical Applications, was at IMEC Belgium in Leuven. However, Biomedical Group members attended the lecture online, using streaming technology. The lecture was real-time projected in the Davidsezaal at the 18th floor of our building at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft). As I really enjoyed the lecture, I would like to share a few main points with you.Dr. Yazicioglu introduced the lecture by explaining what main drivers are behind emerging biomedical electronics. One of the most important drivers is that healthcare costs can be reduced by remote monitoring of the patients. Other important drivers are the need for tools for emerging therapies, need for smart (closed-loop) devices that can adapt their therapy to the patient’s condition, understanding of biology and brain communications and Brain Computer Interfaces (BCI) for, i.e., the gaming industry.
The speaker continued the lecture with topics about instrumentation amplifiers, impedance measurements and biomedical signal processing.
One of the main messages of instrumentation amplifiers part is that implantable and wearable biomedical devices tighten the specifications of traditional instrumentations amplifiers where an optimum between noise and power consumption has to be found. In the biomedical electronics field, instrumentation amplifier specifications are much tougher and an optimum among noise, supply voltage, # of extern components, CMRR, input impedance and DC filtering range needs to be found.
Other types of electronic circuits treated by the speaker were circuits for impedance measurements. Such measurements can be useful in electrode quality check, motion artifact monitoring, medical imaging, respiration monitoring and impedance cardiography.
Last part of the lecture was about biomedical signal processing. In biomedical signal processing, very often, there is a need for high count channel measurements. Employing traditional signal processing schemes it is impossible to keep biomedical devices power efficient. However, by combining Analog Signal Processing (ASP) and Digital Signal Processing (DSP), more power efficient medical devices can be developed. Important massage here was that in the case of careful design the total power consumption of the system can be less than the sum of the power consumptions of all separate blocks,
Psystem << Panalog+Pdigital+Pradio.
I would like to end this post by thanking dr. Firat Yazicioglu for a very interesting and useful lecture.
"Musical activity throughout life may serve as a challenging cognitive exercise, making your brain fitter and more capable of accommodating the challenges of aging," study researcher Brenda Hanna-Pladdy, a neurologist at the Emory University School of Medicine, said in a statement. "Since studying an instrument requires years of practice and learning, it may create alternate connections in the brain that could compensate for cognitive declines as we get older."
In future implants might be recharged by the brain. (Photo: Ana Laura Santos)
Since the algorithm for computing the impact factor is simple, it is also simple to manipulate. And this is exactly what is being done constantly, by authors, who for this reason include a lot of self-citations in their manuscripts, and by journals that impose a lot of self-citations (to the journal) on their authors. Since this is seriously blurring the reputation of people and journals, but also the minds of our evaluators, more objective figures-of-merit have been discussed, the most elegant one probably being the Article Influence. If you are interested you may wish to (and if you are a boss of a scholar or a scholar yourself, you probably should) check out 
Besides many research related posts on this weblog, there is another important aspect in universities: education. Currently the spring examinations take place. It is time to see if our efforts in introducing the students into the exciting world of transistors were good enough. Today I was supervising a retake of a first year BSc-course. In order not to get too bored, I printed out a bunch of papers to read through…
Still in shock by the post below? Don’t be. As always there’s hope on the horizon. The slides of the Hermes Partnership Workshop "Visions Towards ICT Supported Health" of last week have been posted online. If you want to find out more about one or more of the topics below, don’t hesitate to click 
To make it a little more concrete for you; the population is graying all over the globe, not only in western Europe (as I initially thought), with some countries lagging only a little bit behind, such as those in Latin America, Africa and China; the latter catching up quite rapidly, by the way. Soon there will be more people that are either not yet working (as they are still in their nappies, at school, etc.), have retired already or are chronically ill than there will be people that participate in the work force. 
Don’t get me wrong here; this is still more exciting than an ordinary day at the shop. Marijn and Christos are making the final preparations on the uStim, our flexible neurostimulator, which soon will be tried out in vivo; Wannaya and June are working very hard on the circuit design and layout generation of the analog bionic ear; Marcel is working towards the completion of his PhD thesis and having the forms filled in to also publish it as a book — the first on Structured Design of EMI resilient analog circuits; Senad is wrapping up the simulations on a L2-optimized wavelet filter, to appear in a paper currently under review for prospective publication in IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems; Duan is designing a proof-of-principle experiment of the world’s first subsampling jitter-compensated software defined radio; Andre is trying to improve the efficiency of an RF energy harvester for a batteryless ultra lowpower radio; Yongjia is working hard on the circuit definition of an asynchronous level-crossing ADC for analog-to-digital conversion of non-stationary signals, such as ECG, EEG, ECoG, etc; Mark is thinking about how to combine an energy harvester with an ultra lowpower ultrawideband tag, but also a little about his exciting holiday ahead; the many MSc students are working hard on their MSc project and I am working hard on my invited presentation at the International Symposium on Medical Information and Communication Technology. If you want to have a glimpse of what I will be discussing there, check out the following movie/documentary of "
