Cornell University
ECE 5030
Overview and Policy


Prerequisites
This course is limited to MEng students and you may enroll only with permission. You should have some background in analog circuit design at the level of opamps. Some signal analysis would also be useful, as would a biology course. I will assume that you can progarm in Matlab.

Text:
Medical Instrumentation Application and Design (4th edition), by John G. Webster, Wiley, ISBN 978-0471676003

Purpose
The purpose of this course is to enable students to build and understand the basis of electronic instrumentaton applied to signals coming from animals and humans.

Course Work

The course grade will be based on lab assignments and a final paper. Labs will constitute 75% of the grade. The final paper will constitute 25% of the grade. There will be no homework, quizzes or tests. You will be expected to completely understand each lab assignment before the lab. You could lose up to 25% of the lab grade if you are not completely prepared.

Roughly 25% of your lab grade depends upon being prepared. Another 25% depends on the quality, quantity and character of the work done during the lab period. This work will be demonstrated before the end of the last lab period assigned for the exercise. The remaining 50% will be based on your lab writeup. Lab reports are due at the beginning of the next lab period and no late assigments will be accepted without prior permission (Except for sickness or family emergency).

Laboratory work will be done in groups of two where, of course, collaboration is encouraged between members of the group. You will turn in one report per team. No written collaboration between groups is permitted. You are (of course) encouraged to help anyone in lab. If you feel that you have been unfairly graded, you have one week from the time the assignment is handed back to request a regrade. To request a regrade, you must submit the assignment with a written description of your concern attached to the instructor.

Each student in this course is expected to abide by the Cornell University Code of Academic Integrity. Any work submitted by a student in this
course for academic credit will be the student's own work. For this course, collaboration is allowed between partners in a group for lab work, but the final paper will be done as individuals.

In the event of a major campus emergency like an H1N1 flu outbreak, course requirements, deadlines, and grading percentages are subject to changes that may be necessitated by a revised semester calendar or other circumstances.More information about changes in this course will be available on the course web site if necessary.

Laboratory Reports

Each laboratory assignment requires a written report. You will submit a single report for your group. The report must be handed in at your assigned lab section, one week after the lab is finished. The report should be submitted as a collection of pages stapled or bound together.

The report should be a concise documentation of the project assigned. The presentation should be arranged so that any reader with technical competence in the subject can easily understand what was done and how it was done. The following report organization is suggested:

  1. Introduction: Give a short explanation of what was done.
  2. Design and Testing Methods: Explain the approach you used for both software and hardware aspects of the assignment. Be sure to include the design of tests whose outcome are convincing to the reader (or to the instructor in the lab) that the requirements of the assignment have been met.
  3. Documentation: Include here drawings and program listings, together with any explanatory comments needed.
  4. Results: How fast was it? How accurate was it? What were the error ranges?
  5. Conclusions: Useability, what you might have done differently, etc. Any comments concerning the assignment, including suggestions for improvement, excuses, and complaints.
  6. Answers to specific questions given in the lab writeups.
  7. Commented listing of all programs which you write or modify.
  8. Schematics of any circuits which you build.

Final paper

The final paper will be a chance for students to investigate some course topic in more depth. Students will be expected to consult original research papers, research reviews and other material. The topics may be mathematical, circuit oriented, societal (ethics, safety, testing), or biologically oriented, but should be reasonably related to the class material. The final paper will be written in the form of a web page, so it may contain images, animations, etc, but must be more like an academic paper and less like a flash game. Sources must be properly attributed and documented.