The medical chip is a new interdisciplinary area covering microelectronics and biomedical engineering. As an important part of the medical chip, the wearable medical chip is usually used to obtain and process important physiological signals. By this way, the wearable chip can be used to extract corresponding physiological information, monitor the health condition of the users, treat the sudden diseases in time, predict the critical diseases and decrease the mortality. Wearable chips are an important building block of the new medical treatment system based on the policy of putting prevention first. This paper contains three parts to introduce the status of the wearable medical chips. Firstly, the requirements and the key techniques in the wearable medical chip design are summarized, such as the low power, full integration and low noise design methods, based on analyzing the wearable application environment and the characteristics of physiological signals. Secondly, the research progress of wearable medical chips are reviewed, including the chips and systems for processing electrocardiogram (ECG) signal, electroencephalography (EEG) signal, pulse wave, and respiration signal. Finally, the feature of wearable medical chips is discussed at the end of the paper. With the development of microelectronics, integrated circuit and biomedical engineering, there will be more kinds of wearable medical chips with more functions and patterns to satisfy the demands of the health and medical treatment.

wearable  /  medical chip  /  low power  /  full integration  /  low noise