A Custom-designed Atrial Fibrillation Detection Hardware on a Flexible Substrate

This paper proposes a custom-designed atrial fibrillation (AF) detection hardware implemented and fabricated as a flexible application-specific integrated circuit (Flex-ASIC) on a polyimide substrate. Even simple AF prediction algorithms in the literature take up a large chip area when implemented in hardware. We propose a simpler AF prediction algorithm leading to an area-efficient hardware implementation as a Flex-ASIC without a significant impact on AF prediction performance. The AF detection Flex-ASIC is fabricated in Pragmatic’s 0.6 μm FlexIC technology on a 200 mm polyimide wafer, and tested with thousands of electrocardiogram test vectors. For the first time, the paper demonstrates the full functionality of an AF detection hardware fabricated on a low-cost flexible substrate.