This paper describes the design of a biological signal conditioning system. This system, called BioBox, is comprised of a proprietary piece of hardware that performs the signal conditioning and a companion tablet application. The tablet displays and records up to four channels of electromyographic (EMG) data or two channels of electrocardiographic (ECG) data in real time. The tablet application can also be used to adjust characteristics such as filter gain and filter passband in real time. The BioBox system is designed to be portable and easy to use. It samples at a 1 kHz sampling frequency and 10 bit resolution.
The BioBox hardware uses a dynamically programmable Analog Signal Processor (dpASP) to condition biological signals. A dpASP is essentially the analog equivalent of an FPGA; it is a microchip that is composed of elementary analog components that can be configured in a vast number of ways for different applications [...