A Review of Ultra-Low-Power Wearable Technologies for ECG, EEG, and EMG Monitoring
Keywords:
wearable sensors, biopotential acquisition, ultra-low-power circuits, ECG, EEG, EMG, energy harvesting, edge computingAbstract
Continuous, unobtrusive acquisition of biopotential signals outside the clinic has become one of the defining ambitions of modern biomedical engineering. Electrocardiography (ECG), electroencephalography (EEG), and electromyography (EMG) each carry diagnostically rich information about cardiac, neural, and neuromuscular function, yet all three have historically depended on bulky, mains-powered instrumentation confined to hospitals and laboratories. Over the past decade, advances in low-voltage analog circuit design, aggressive digital power gating, embedded machine learning, and body-worn energy harvesting have collectively made it plausible to acquire these signals for days or weeks from a device weighing only a few grams. This review examines the technological foundations that make such ultra-low-power operation possible. It surveys electrode technologies and analog front-end architectures that reduce acquisition power into the microwatt regime while preserving the input-referred noise and common-mode rejection required for clinical utility; embedded processing strategies, including event-driven and neuromorphic classifiers, that suppress radio activity by transmitting decisions rather than raw waveforms; wireless communication protocols and duty-cycling schemes that dominate the system energy budget in most practical designs; and harvesting and power-management approaches that point toward battery-free or self-sustaining operation. Three comparative tables consolidate reported performance figures across representative front-ends, embedded classifiers, and energy sources. The review concludes that the field has largely solved the acquisition problem at the circuit level, and that the remaining bottlenecks are systemic: motion artifact robustness, electrode–skin stability over long deployments, the mismatch between harvested and demanded power, and the absence of standardized reporting that would allow fair comparison across published designs.
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