A MICROMINIATURIZED HEART MONITORING SYSTEM FOR ASTRONAUTS

Abstract

The heart monitoring system used by the astronaut in his space walk from the shuttle used as a portion of the instrumentation, a voltage controlled oscillator and a matching discriminator to encode and decode the heart waveform. In addition to small size, low power, and high reliability, there were additional requirements for greater than normal signal rejection by the input filter of the discriminator and cost reduction by limiting the number of different semiconductors used in order to keep lot qualification costs low. The circuits were fabricated using thick film hybrid techniques. The circuit designs, fabrication techniques and packaging will be described.