Data Analysis of Electrical Impedance Spectroscopy-Based Biosensors Using Artificial Neural Networks for Resource Constrained Devices

Portable and wearable sensors have gained attention in recent years to perform measurements in many different applications. Sensors based on Electrical Impedance Spectroscopy (EIS) are particularly promising, because they can make accurate measurements with minimum perturbation to the sample under test. Electrochemical biosensors are devices that use electrochemical techniques to measure a target analyte. In the case of electrochemical biosensors based on EIS, the measured impedance spectrum is fitted to that of an equivalent electrical circuit, whose component values are then used to estimate the concentration of the target analyte. Fitting EIS data is usually carried out by sophisticated algorithms running on a PC. In this paper, we have evaluated the feasibility to perform EIS data fitting using simple Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) that can be run on resource constrained microcontrollers, which are typically used for portable and wearable sensors. We considered a typical case of an impedance spectrum in the range 0.1 Hz–10 kHz, modeled by using the simplified Randles equivalent circuit. Our analyses have shown that simple ANNs can be a low power alternative to perform EIS data fitting on low-cost microcontrollers with a memory occupation in the order of kilo bytes and a measurement accuracy between 1% and 3%.