A Hybrid Bioimpedance Spectroscopy Architecture for a Wide Frequency Exploration of Tissue Electrical Properties

Bioimpedance spectroscopy (BIS) is a technique increasingly used for measuring the electrical properties of biological tissues. Choosing an integrated system architecture for bioimpedance spectroscopy is very dependent on the application and ruled by several constraints such as precision, bandwidth and measurement time. This paper presents a hybrid architecture providing fast measurement time while maximizing precision. This new architecture has been defined for a wide exploration of electrical properties of biological tissues. It combines the frequency sweep and multitone measurement techniques. Using the multitone measurement over the α dispersion and a frequency sweep over the β dispersion, enable the system architect to overcome the design challenges faced when using each technique separately. Its critical blocks are optimized for a bandwidth up to 10 MHz, thus covering the α and β frequency ranges, an example of the design optimization is detailed for the current driver.