Design of a portable (CW) fNIRS embedded system

Design and development of a continuous wave functional near infrared spectroscopy system

Functional Near InfraRed Spectroscopy uses light sources and optical detectors for human brain monitoring. In this paper, a portable, low cost, battery-operated, multi-channel, continuous wave fNIRS embedded system, hosting up to 64 LED sources and 128 Silicon PhotoMultiplier optical detectors, is reported on. The designed system is based on a scalable architecture, in which each probe consists of 8 modular and flexible stands, able to host 4 bi-color LEDs as light sources, 16 silicon photomultipliers as photodetectors and a temperature sensor. The hardware structure allows to easily set up several relevant parameters: the timing of the LEDs, the optical power emitted by the LEDs; the acqui…