Emerging Biomedical Electronics

Dear Colleagues,

Healthcare is currently transitioning from hospital-centered medical services to ubiquitous healthcare, focusing on continuous patient monitoring beyond clinical settings. While traditional clinical supervision is typically intended for acute conditions, only some chronic patients fully benefit from in-hospital care. In these circumstances, ubiquitous healthcare frameworks are intended to enable real-time remote monitoring, health assessments and pre-diagnosis support. Such systems are expected to provide intelligent decision support for medical evaluations and personalized treatment plans, resulting in fewer physician visits, reduced hospital congestion, and improved patient safety and quality of life.

Portable and wearable biomedical devices are central to this evolution. Commercially available wearables already offer solutions for self-monitoring of key physiological parameters such as heart rate, blood oxygen levels and physical activity. The biomedical industry has experienced a rapid growth in wearable technology, including bio-potential monitors, non-invasive cerebrovascular activity, polysomnography and even brain–computer interfaces, while the number and capabilities of such devices is continuously increasing. These devices collectively can form a sensor network (Wireless/Body Area Networks: BAN/WBAN), which facilitate comprehensive health monitoring within ubiquitous healthcare frameworks. Additionally, devices such as cochlear implants, pacemakers, and muscular stimulators integrate electrostimulation into the wearable technology landscape.

Although signal processing is predominantly digital, signal acquisition and preconditioning stages are analog, imposing very strict design specifications for instrumentation amplifiers and filters. Furthermore, wearables are designed for battery, or even battery-less operation, driving innovation towards low-power and low-voltage design techniques, including charge pumps, bulk terminal biasing and subthreshold operation, to achieve miniaturization and portability.

An emerging area in biomedical electronics focuses on wide-range parameter tuning, essential for performance optimization. This is achieved through programmable or reconfigurable circuit designs that provide broad tuning capabilities to meet specific biomedical signal specifications. These designs leverage novel design paradigms that integrate computational intelligence, enabling features like self-adaptation, self-healing, and self-repair.

At the same time, biomedical electronics must ensure high processing capacity, speed, accuracy, and immunity to noise and disturbances. In this regard, integrated biomedical solutions employ advanced digital processing and artificial intelligence for data acquisition, interpretation, and classification, further enhancing decision support systems.

This Special Issue addresses major advancements in biomedical electronics, targeting innovative solutions for low-voltage and low-power circuits, analog front-end development for biomedical signal acquisition, smart sensor interfaces, biomedical signal processing, and AI-driven decision support in healthcare. Key topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Three-dimensional-printed circuits in biomedical electronics;
• Three-dimensional printing in biomedical sensor systems;
• (Smart) sensor interfaces for biomedical applications;
• (Wireless) Body Area Networks;
• Analog amplifier and filter stages;
• Analog design automation;
• Analog front end design for biomedical signal acquisition;
• Analog to digital converters;
• Artificial intelligence in biomedical systems;
• Artificial augmented/virtual reality in biomedical engineering;
• Automatic design and optimization of analog circuits;
• Biomedical sensor systems;
• Biomedical signal processing;
• Integration of biosensors in chat-bots;
• Integration of biosensors in decision support systems;
• Instrumentational amplifiers;
• Low-voltage and low-power circuit design techniques;
• Operational amplifiers;
• Programmable and reconfigurable circuits with biomedical applications;
• Quantum sensors and quantum processing for biomedical applications.

Dr. Paul Farago
Dr. Robert Radu Ilesan
Dr. Sebastian Stefaniga
Prof. Dr. Sorin Hintea
Guest Editors

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