Event Date
Prof. Patrick P. Mercier
University of California, San Diego
Abstract
Small IoT devices hold considerable promise to monitor anything from humans to environmental pollutants. However, most current devices only monitor a limited number of parameters that are, in many cases, only peripherally related to many health conditions or enterprises. Furthermore, many such devices may be large, bulky, and rigid, thereby precluding seamless integration into daily life.
Addressing these issues requires: 1) development of new sensor technologies that provide more actionable data in thin, flexible form factors; and 2) engineering of supporting electronic infrastructure to condition, digitize, and wirelessly communicate data in an extremely energy efficient manner. This presentation will discuss emerging sensor technologies that can non-invasively monitor physiochemistry (e.g., glucose, blood alcohol concentration, and lactate) in thin, flexible, and energy-efficiency wearable devices. We will also cover integrated circuit building blocks and architectures that make acquisition and telemetry of sensed information so energy-efficient that that they can be easily powered from new local energy sources (e.g., wearable glucose biofuel cells). Such net-zero-power operation will ultimately enable devices that are completely autonomous and invisible to the user, to the point where users are virtually unaware of their wearable devices after placement – in other words, they are “unawareable” devices.
Biography
Patrick Mercier is a Professor and Vice Chair of Electrical and Computer Engineering and co-founder/co-director of the Center for Wearable Sensors and the Power Management Integration Center at UC San Diego. He received his B.Sc. degree from the University of Alberta, Canada, and the S.M. and Ph.D. degrees from MIT. Prof. Mercier has received numerous awards, including the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) Author Recognition Award, the San Diego Engineering Council Outstanding Engineer Award, an NSF CAREER Award, a Biocom Catalyst Award, a UCSD Academic Senate Distinguished Teaching Award, a DARPA Young Faculty Award, a Beckman Young Investigator Award, the ISSCC Jack Kilby Award, amongst others. He has published over 200 peer-reviewed papers in venues such as Science, Nature Biotechnology, Nature Biomedical Engineering, Nature Communications, ISSCC (26 papers), Advanced Science, and others. He is an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Circuits and Systems and the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Letters, was a member of the ISSCC, CICC, and VLSI Technical Program Committees, and has co-edited three books: High-Density Integrated Electrocortical Neural Interfaces (Elsevier Academic Press, 2019), Power Management Integrated Circuits (CRC Press, 2016), and Ultra-Low-Power Short-Range Radios (Springer, 2015). His research interests include the design of energy-efficient mixed-signal systems, RF circuits, power converters, and sensor interfaces for wearable, medical, and mobile applications.
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Meeting ID: 987 5432 6150
Passcode: 049255