Acquiring high-rate neural spike data with hardware-constrained embedded sensors

In an effort to enable embedded sensors that are hardware and bandwidth constrained to acquire high- frequency neural signals, signal-filtering and signal- compression algorithms have been implemented and tested on a commercial-off-the-shelf embedded-system platform. The sensor modules have been programmed to acquire, filter, and transmit raw biological signals at a rate of 32 kbps. Furthermore, on-board signal processing enables one channel sampled at a rate of 4 kS/s at 12-bit resolution to be compressed via ADPCM and transmitted in real time. In addition, the sensors can be configured to only transmit individual time-referenced "spike" waveforms, or only the spike parameters for alleviating network traffic and increasing battery life.