Design of a circuit to provide scanning power supply to a sensor array to reduce the number of wires for data acquisition

This research aims at the design of a circuit to provide power supply to every element in a sensor array in a scanning style for the data acquisition with very few wires. It is useful in data acquisition when there is a need of large amount of wires, but without enough space to hold these wires. It will make a sensing system practical by considerably reducing the number of the wires, especially for the application to a tubular-shape force sensor array on a long tubular device such as a colonoscope due to very limited available space for running too many wires. In the application of the designed circuit to a sensor array of 16 columns and 445 rows in a colonoscope, it has been achieved that only 19 wires were used for the data acquisition for all the 7120 sensing elements. Without this circuit, at least 461 wires are needed as explained in the paper. In this paper, the design of the circuit was explained first. Then the outputs of the circuit were simulated using a software package and experimentally verified using PCB boards. Two of the PCB boards has been built and tested on a sensor array with graphical display of the applied force. One of the final goals of this project is to be used in a skin sensor array for colonoscope to avoid bowel perforation which is a life threatening complication during a colonoscopy.