Description
Applications are demanding new approaches to electronic systems. The concept of obtaining the best performances in terms of speed and dimensions, that drove the electronic design in the last decades, is no more the unique one. The electronic systems are nowadays applied in very much different scenarios, where sometimes speed is not at all important, but power consumption and reliability are the keys. It is strategic to find new approaches that optimise the interaction and exchange of information, from the sensors to the system. The two levels (system and device) are strictly related, and design choices have to be done looking at the system as a global entity to be optimised.
A promising approach is to take inspiration from the biological systems, applying a merge of the techniques born in recent years and exploiting them for reaching the best tradeoff between quality, performance, and power consumption. This approach is named as Bio-Inspired Electronics: this new paradigm is applied to Biomedical and Precision Agriculture applications.
In particular, the main activities in biomedics are:
- Wearables for Rehabilitation and HomeCare
- Wearables Pulse Wave Velocity for Cardiac Diseases Monitoring
- Implantable Systems for Drug Delivery
- Vision Implanted Systems for Blindness
- Injectable Body-Dust Devices Brain Signal Monitoring
About Precision Agriculture and Climate Change facing, the benefits that technology provides to a green and sustainable economy are highly appreciated and under intense research and development globally. Circuits and Systems (CAS), which are the base for any system, can bring the needed functionalities and performances for reaching eco-friendly, circular and practical solutions.
The IoT active connections in agriculture (as an example in Europe) are exponentially increasing, proving that Precision Agriculture is a very fast-growing research field, where more controlled quality production, water use optimisation, and a lower spreading of pesticides and fertilisers are some key issues, serving the improvement of food quality, but also helping the respect of agriculture for the environment.
For reaching these targets, electronics are the perfect tool for interfacing the data sources, extracting the data and processing them, and obtaining the needed information along the whole food chain: from the farmer, and the professional stakeholders to the consumers. They can bring important innovations, advancing the actual strategies based on remote or indirect measurements, by instead in-place measuring the plant and soil parameters (a.k.a. Let the Plants do The Talking), associated with more standard information derived from environmental conditions.