ElectroSense: a Low-cost Wearable Potentiostat for Real-time Monitoring of Glucose Level

In this paper, a wireless potentiostat code-named ElectroSense, for electrochemical sensors, will be presented. The system is devoted to real-time detection of glucose in wearable medical applications. Differently from other state-of-the-art works, which generate the measurement signal through discrete digital-to-analog converters (DACs) or, alternatively, through integrated DACs in high-end microcontrollers, in this work a DAC from filtered pulse width modulated (PWM) signals is adopted. The ubiquitous presence of integrated PWM peripherals in cheap microcontrollers, which generally also integrate the analog-to-digital converter (ADC), enables both the generation and acquisition of measurement signals on a single low-end microcontroller. As a result, the system’s production costs, the power consumption, and the overall size are greatly reduced. All these features allow the system’s adoption in healthcare Internet-of-things (IoT) ecosystems. The circuit schematic of the ElectroSense potentiostat will be presented in detail, exploiting advantages and drawbacks of the PWM-DAC approach. After a description of the adopted electrochemical sensing technology, experimental measurements through both amperometry and voltammetry modes, will prove the efficacy of the proposed electronic system for real-time measurements of glucose in wearable medical applications.