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Ph.D. Alum Anna Dixon Receives IEEE Best Paper Award

April 4, 2015

Anna Dixon, who completed her Ph.D. at UW EE in 2012, has received the 2015 IEEE Circuits and Systems Society Biomedical Circuits and Systems Best Paper Award. Currently employed at Gryphon Scientific, Dixon focuses on big data analytics, modeling and simulation in a variety of fields including epidemiology.

Titled “Compressed Sensing System Considerations for ECG and EMG Wireless Bio-Sensors,” the paper was co-authored by Emily Allstot, Daibashish Gangopadhyay and David Allstot. Each author received a $500 award.

The paper bridges the gap between the compressed sensing concept and biomedical signal hardware designs, providing a new approach for the biomedical circuits and systems research community. By taking both algorithms and hardware design into consideration, the authors present a broad look at the design of compressed sensing systems with applications to biomedical signals. Previously, research fell into one of two categories: a single hardware design for compressed sensing or compressed sensing of bio-signals without hardware consideration.

The paper is a useful resource for future designers of bio-signal compressed sensing systems as it not only leads readers through the mathematical intricacies of compressed sensing but also shows how to incorporate the knowledge into hardware designs. In particular, Dixon and co-authors cover design considerations for generic CS encoders, both analog and digital encoders, methods to dynamically control sparsity of bio-signals such as electrocardiograph and various types of electromyography signals, performance of different measurement matrices and reconstruction algorithm selection.