News

WULPUS: An open - source Wearable Ultra - Low Power UltraSound probe

5 months 2 weeks ago
Share on:
Papers laying on top of one another

The ultrasound team of Prof. L. Benini at ETH Zürich (link) is proud to share their flagship wearable ultrasound system, WULPUS, with the research community using a permissive open source license . The release includes full PCB design with components, layout, schematics in Altium, the firmware and program examples for the MSP430 and nRF52832 Microcontrollers and is available under: https://github.com/pulp-bio/wulpus 

WULPUS, first presented at IUS2022, is a truly wearable ultra-low-power open research ultrasound platform (see our related publications below) and has been used in applications that include: carotid arteries monitoring, muscle thickness tracking, concurrent heart and respiration rate monitoring, hand gesture recognition, coupling with wearable electromyography sensors.

The platform features:
•    8 time-multiplexed channels
•    30.8 dB Programable-Gain Amplifier + 10 dB Operational Amplifier
•    8 MSPS Analog-to-Digital conversion (12 bit resolution) via the MSP430 microcontroller
•    Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) wireless link (320 kbps throughput)
•    Up to 50 acquisitions per-second (400 samples per acquisition, raw data streaming mode)

The entire system is placed on two stacked compact PCBs (modular design, with an overall footprint of 46 x 25 mm) and consumes only 22 mW in the raw data streaming mode (at 50 acquisitions per second).

We are hoping that other research groups can use WULPUS and will be happy to accept pull requests for additional features, bug fixes, and improvements.

WULPUS photo (left) and system diagram (right). The system design is modular, with an “acquisition PCB” (featuring the two microcontrollers, signal amplification, and wireless connection), and a “High-Voltage (HV) PCB” (featuring the level shifting, multiplexing, T/R switch, and transducer connector).

 

Example applications of WULPUS: A) cardiorespiratory monitoring, B) armband for gesture recognition, C) common carotid artery diameter monitoring (IUS 2022-2023)

For more information, read the associated research papers:
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9958156
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10307059
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10307398
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10307824