A miniaturized low-power wireless remote environmental monitoring system based on electrochemical analysis

In this paper, we report a miniaturized low-power wireless remote environmental monitoring system. This system has been developed for on-site monitoring of water pollution by heavy-metal ions. The system is composed of three parts: an electrochemical sensor module using microfabricated electrodes for detecting heavy-metal contamination in sample water; a custom potentiostat module including readout circuitry, analog-to-digital converter and microcontroller; and a radio frequency (RF) module for sending detected signals to a base station through wireless communication. The electrochemical sensor module is implemented using microfabricated mercury working electrodes (WEs), solid-state reference electrode (SSRE), and platinum counter electrode (CE). For the low-power operation, direct frequency-shift keying (FSK) modulation and simple binary FSK demodulation methods are used for RF module which is realized using 0.18 μm CMOS technology. All the modules are hybrid integrated in a printed circuit board (PCB) and low-power consumption below 1 mW has been achieved.