Technique for Interference Reduction in Battery Powered Physiological Monitoring Devices

This paper presents a novel simple method to identify and remove systematic interference in battery powered physiological monitoring devices. This interference is very typically introduced via fluctuations in the power supply voltage, caused by the nonideal output resistance of small batteries, when a transceiver chip changes operating modes. The proposed method is designed to have low computational complexity in order to potentially allow for low cost, real-time implementations on low-power-based platforms, either in the system front or back end. Additionally, the paper provides guidelines on how to choose some of the operating conditions of the transceiver in order to minimize the effect of the interference through the application of the proposed method. Overall, successful performance is illustrated with experimental results obtained from an acoustic monitoring system, since this is considered to have specifications which are representative of most physiological monitoring devices.