Low Power Electronics and Bio-Medical Applications

Dear Colleagues,

Technological innovation and medical advancements have always gone hand in hand. Recent years have seen an increased interest in wearable and implantable electronics for various bio-medical and healthcare related applications. This area is no longer occupied by only academic and research institutes, but increasingly more by medical and consumer industries alike. Low-power electronics are paving the way for new research tools and investigational devices that allow unprecedented insight in the human body and disease mechanism. Such technologies also find their way into clinical, as well as in at-home diagnostic and monitoring devices. A world-wide increased awareness on health spurred a new branch of consumer oriented wearable devices for health monitoring. This trend will continue and most likely only accelerate. Wearable electronics will become more powerful while becoming less obtrusive. This pushes the technological exploration towards novel directions including remote and non-contact sensing. Another logical route is embedding such device permanently into human body which is ushering in a new exciting era of implantable devices. No longer are such wearable or implantable devices primarily used for background monitoring, but increasingly more as therapeutic devices. Furthermore, active disease prevention and even human augmentation are concepts that become feasible in the near future.

In order to advance the field and enable such ambitious breakthrough application, the proposed Special Issue of JPLEA will be dedicated to innovative technological advancements in the field of next-generation wearable and implantable bio-medical devices. This includes novel sensors and ultra-low-power sensor interface circuits. There is clear push towards multi-modal physiological sensing combining with contextual sensing. As mentioned before, not just sensing, but also actuation is needed. Special attention will go to advanced processing nodes that provide unique benefits. Indeed, CMOS technology advancements have enabled ultra-energy-efficient and cheap on-the-node digital signal processing in advanced CMOS nodes. Combined with advancements in machine-learning, we see the emergence of truly smart wearable and implantable electronic devices. By being able to perform data interpretation locally at very low energy computation, there is no longer the need for streaming raw data to the cloud, but leverage in a smart way local vs. cloud computing resources. We will also explore recent advancements in powering, energy harvesting and communication which are especially important in implantable applications.

Dr. Nick Van Helleputte
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Journal of Low Power Electronics and Applications is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• Ultra-low-power bio-medical sensing
• Ultra-low power bio-medical actuation
• Analog design in advanced CMOS nodes
• Wireless power transfer and energy harvesting in implants
• Wireless communication for implants
• Integration techniques for wearables and/or implantables
• Electro-chemical sensing
• Novel biomedical application
• Electronics for disease prevention
• Electronics for closed-loop therapy
• Machine-learning algorithms for physiological sensing including feature extraction, personalized models, signal integrity and robustness, ....
• Remote and non-contact sensing