A MINIATURE AND LOW-POWER POTENTIOSTAT FOR INTEGRATION WITH WEARABLE SENSORS

The potentiostat is an analytical device and an important part of an electrochemical instrument commonly used in electrochemical experiments to investigate chemical reaction mechanisms and other chemical phenomena. The ability to detect chemical phenomena can be useful for early disease detection. Nowadays conventional potentiostats are designed as benchtop instruments for use in laboratory environments. In contrast, a wearable potentiostat is designed to interface with wearable biochemical sensors for disease diagnostics. This thesis reports a wearable potentiostat that is designed for interfacing with a sensor array (eight to ten working electrodes). The system is battery-powered using lithium-ion batteries. The data is transmitted to the user using a Bluetooth communication link. The entire system is controlled by a single Advanced RISC Machines (ARM) M4 microcontroller with an integrated Bluetooth low-energy radio module (Silicon Labs EFR32BG13 SoC). This work reports on the performance of the designed potentiostat in terms of accuracy, reliability, and power efficiency. The performance of the potentiostat is compared with the existing commercial benchtop potentiostat devices. Also, this work identifies further steps that will lead toward circuit miniaturization and further power efficiency improvements which will allow the manufacturing of wearable sensing devices comparable to the size of a wristwatch