Transducers & Instrumentation

Department of Bioengineering · Christian Medical College Vellore

Course materials for Transducers and Instrumentation — covering biomedical sensing and electrical stimulation systems. Includes lecture slides, assignments, and additional resources.

Semester: August – December, 2026
Course Instructor: Sivakumar Balasubramanian
Teaching Assistants (TA): Diwakar BR, Dr Ritwika C
Lecture Timing: 02:00 PM – 03:30 PM, Mondays and Thursdays
Lab Timing: 02:00 PM - 05:00 PM, Tuesdays

Lecture Slides

1. Measurement Fundamentals
What makes a measurement trustworthy: the signal chain (transduce → condition → digitize → process → interpret); sensor I/O model; static characteristics (accuracy, precision, linearity, sensitivity, drift); calibration; errors (systematic vs. random); noise and SNR; sampling, aliasing, and quantization; reporting and uncertainty.

2. Kinematics and kinetics (slides to be added)
Measuring linear and angular displacement, velocity, and acceleration; digital encoders; camera-based systems; MEMS accelerometers and gyroscopes; force and torque from strain gauges; Wheatstone bridge conditioning; ADC architectures (SAR vs sigma-delta) — tradeoffs between speed and resolution in the context of motion and force measurement.

3. Biopotentials (slides to be added)
Origins of biopotentials; electrode–electrolyte interface; electrochemistry and half-cell potentials; skin–electrode impedance; instrumentation amplifier concepts (CMRR, input impedance, differential vs. common-mode); integrated analogue front-ends (AD8232/ADS1299); ECG, EMG, EEG acquisition.

4. Pressure, flow, and volume (slides to be added)
Piezoelectric and piezoresistive pressure sensors; differential and absolute pressure; invasive and non-invasive blood pressure; respiratory flow and volume; spirometry.

5. Thermal measurements (slides to be added)
Thermocouples (Seebeck effect); thermistors (NTC/PTC); platinum RTDs; infrared / radiation thermometry; body-temperature measurement contexts.

6. Electrical stimulation (slides to be added)
Electrode–tissue interface for stimulation; charge injection limits and electrode damage; monophasic vs biphasic waveforms; stimulation parameters (pulse width, frequency, amplitude); functional electrical stimulation (FES); TENS; cardiac pacing; cochlear implants; safety standards (IEC 60601-2-10).

Course Live Blog

The course is lived blogged in Substack. The following are the links to the live lecture blogs:

  1. Measurements and its scales (03 Aug 26)
  2. Measurement Signal Chain Model: Part 1 (08 Aug 26)
  3. Measurement Signal Chain Model: Part 2 (10 Aug 26)

Course Content (Lab)

The lab will closely follow the lecture content, with hands-on experiments and demonstrations for each module. Students will individually complete lab exercises, which will be assessed as part of the course grade.

You need to purchase the basic lab kit (contact the TAs for details), which will be used for most of the lab exercises.

Here is the tentative list of lab exercises:

  1. Lab orientation and safety briefing
  2. Fundamentals of microcontroller programming

Rest to come soon.

Notes

Here are some notes for the pre-requisites and material covered in the course.

  1. Basic Electrical Circuits
  2. Basic Electronics

Prerequisites

Electrical Engineering Fundamentals: Basic electrical circuits; Kirchoff’s laws; Thevenin & Norton equivalents; Basic electronics; Operational amplifiers. | Signal Processing: Fourier & Laplace transform; Filtering; Sampling theorem; Basic digital signal processing. | Programming: C, Python/Matlab programming; Basics of microcontrollers.

Grading

The assessment for the course will give equal importance to theory and lab components. The final grade will be calculated based on the following components:

Component Weight
Assignments 15%
Lab exercises 15%
Quizzes 5%
Midterm 15%
Final 50%

The mid-term and finals will involve both theory and lab components, with 50% weightage given to each. The mid-term will be held around the 7th week (October), and the final exam will be held during the last week of the semester (December).

Tutorials and Assignments

Assignments will involve both paper-based and programming-based problems, and will be released on the course website. Students are expected to submit their assignments by the due date.

To be added.

All assignments are due by 11:59 PM on the due date. You have 5 late days to use through the semester; each late day extends a deadline by 24 hours. Once the late days are used up, late submissions will not be accepted.

Mid-term and Final Exams

The theory and lab exams will be closed book exams. The lab exams will involve programming components to be done on the lab computers without access to the internet.

Submission

All assignments must be submitted as soft copies on the course submission portal (link to be added).

AI Policy

You are encouraged to use AI tools (e.g., ChatGPT, Claude, etc.) for learning and understanding concepts. However, you must not submit any AI-generated content as your own work. All submissions must be your original work, and you must acknowledge any external sources used in your assignments or projects. Note that your mid-term and final exams will not allow the use of AI tools, so use these tool judiciously to learn the course material.