Sensing technology plays a critical role in improving people’s lives and in enabling scientific discoveries. In this seminar, I will introduce my recent works that explore the co-optimization of sensor, circuit, and algorithm to develop cutting-edge sensing systems that are low-cost, compact, and accessible. These works encompass wide applications across disciplines, including human health monitoring, laboratory animal monitoring, smart agriculture, and consumer electronics. I will talk about a sock-based wireless system that I designed for human health monitoring, which makes early detection of Atrial Fibrillation (AFib) possible. This sensing system consists of a flexible multi-channel tactile sensors array fabricated on a paper substrate, a low-power application specific integrated circuit, and a Bluetooth microcontroller. Thanks to the compact size and flexible sensing interface, the system can detect AFib in a comfortable manner, demonstrating high accuracy and sufficient immunity to motion artifacts under typical sitting conditions. Adapting a similar multiple sensing channels and compact design, a sensing system was developed to monitor miniature mouse tail heartbeat with motion artifact reduction. Wireless power transfer technique was also developed for sensing applications that are preferred to have long-term non-tethered use cases, such as neural probes and underground soil sensors for smart agriculture.

Finally, I will briefly discuss future improvement opportunities for sensing systems through co-optimization of sensor design and machine learning algorithms, inspired by my recent work on smartphone touchscreen technology. 

Dr. Weijie Luo is a sensor design and system integration engineer with a focus of touch screen technology for smartphones at Apple Inc. He received his Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees from the Department of Instrument Science and Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China, in 2012 and 2015, respectively. In 2021, he received his Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah, USA. His research interests include sensor design, analog circuit design, sensing system, sensing algorithms, machine learning, wireless power transfer and wireless data telemetry.