According to NHTSA Traffic Safety Facts [9], bicyclist deaths and injuries in 2013 are recorded as 732 and 48,000, respectively. In the State of Florida the safety of bicyclists is of particular concern as the bicycle fatality rates are nearly triple the national average. Further Florida ranks #1 on bicycle fatality rate in the nation for several years. To determine the cause of near-misses and crashes, a detailed study of bicyclist behavior and environmental conditions is needed. In a Florida Department of Transport (FDOT) funded project, USF CUTR has proposed naturalistic bicycle study based on ride data collected from 100 bicyclists for 3000 hrs. To this end, Bicycle Data Acquisition System (BDAS) is being researched and developed. The main objective of this thesis work is to design and implement low power video and audio subsystems of BDAS as specified by domain experts (USF CUTR researchers). This work also involves design of graphical user interface (Windows application) to visualize the data in a synchronized manner. Selection of appropriate hardware to capture and store data is critical as it should meet several criteria like low power consumption, low cost, and small form factor. Several Camera controllers were evaluated in terms of their performance and cost. The major challenges in this design are synchronization between collected data, storage of the video and sensor data, and design of low power embedded subsystems.

A method to implement high-speed pulse shaping filters has been discussed. This technique uses a unique look up table based architecture implemented in 90nm CMOS using a standard cell based ASIC flow. This method enables the implementation of pulse shaping filters for multi-giga bit per second data transmission. In this work a raised cosine FIR filter operating at 4 GHz has been designed. Various Implementation issues and solutions encountered during the synthesis and layout stages have been discussed. In the second portion of this work, the design of a unique address based serial peripheral interface (SPI) for initializing, calibrating and controlling various blocks in a large system has been discussed. Some modifications have been made to the standard four-wire SPI protocol to enable high control speeds with lesser number of top-level pads. This interface has been designed to function in the duplex mode to do both read and write operations.

Personal telehealth plays a crucial role in addressing global challenges of aging population and rising cost for health care. Tiny and wirelessly connected medical sensors, for example embedded in clothes or on the body, will be an integrated part of lifestyle, and will allow hospitals to remotely diagnose patients in their home.  In this thesis, a wireless bio-sensing with smart phone based monitoring system is proposed to provide a home based telehealth care for continuous monitoring. The system consists of two main parts: a wireless sensor and a health application on the smart phone. This thesis is to design the first part of the system - a wireless temperature and electrocardiography (ECG) sensor. The sensor integrates ECG front-end analog block, a micro-controller and a Bluetooth low energy (BLE) connectivity IC on a single board. To achieve the miniaturization of the sensor and users’ comfort in mind, the sensor is designed as a miniaturized hybrid system utilizing flexible batteries and printed electrodes. This can efficiently detect ECG signals and transfer them to a smart phone through BLE link.

The goal of software-defined radio (SDR) is to move the processing of radio signals from the analog domain to the digital domain — to use digital microchips instead of analog circuit components. Until faster, higher-precision analog-to-digital (ADCs) and digital-to-analog converters (DACs) become affordable, however, some analog signal processing will be necessary. We still need to convert high-radio frequency (RF) signals that we receive to low intermediate-frequency (IF) or baseband (centered on zero Hz) signals in order for ADCs to sample them and feed them into microchips for processing. The reverse is true when we transmit. Amplification is also needed on the receive side to fully utilize the dynamic range of the ADC and power amplification is needed on the transmit side to increase the power output from the DAC for transmission. Analog filtering is also needed to avoid saturating the ADC or to filter out interference when receiving and to avoid transmitting spurs. The analog frequency conversion, amplification and filtering section of a radio is called the RF front end. This thesis describes work on a new RF front end daughterboard for the Universal Software Radio Peripheral, or USRP. The USRP is a software-radio hardware platform designed to be used with the GNU Radio software radio software package. Using the Motorola RFIC4 chip, the new daughterboard receives RF signals, converts them to baseband and does analog filtering and amplification before feeding the signal into the USRP for processing. The chip also takes transmit signals from the USRP, converts them from baseband to RF and amplifies and filters them. The board was designed and laid out by Randall Nealy. I wrote the software driver for GNU Radio. The driver defines the interface between the USRP and the RFIC chip, controls the physical settings, and calculates and sets the hundreds of variables necessary to operate this extremely complex chip correctly. It allows plug-and-play compatibility with the current USRP daughterboards and supplies additional functions not available in any other daughterboard. / Master of Science