Start-Up Aims to Untangle Hospital Patients With Wireless Sensors

Surendar Magar, the chief executive of HMicro, said in a recent interview that while the start-up is trying to change how hospitals gather data from patients, he still does what he has always done: make chips.

Magar’s career is dyed in semiconductors. After finishing a doctorate in digital signal processing, he joined Texas Instruments and helped develop the TMS320 processor released in 1983. He later started the Wi-Fi chipmaker Athena Semiconductors, which he sold to Broadcom in 2005.

HMicro has devised its own unique chips, but it is difficult to leave healthcare out of the equation. Its first product is a wireless chip that measures a patient’s vital signs and relays that information to a smartphone or dongle plugged into a patient monitor. HMicro will sell chips to equipment makers that can build wearable sensors around them.

The Fremont, Calif. chipmaker has raised around $30 million in funding since 2008. Last month, the company revealed that its first HC1100 chip had entered “high-volume production.” But it has not yet announced any original equipment manufacturers as partners.

At the heart of its first product is the company’s unique chip design, which it started laying out with STMicroelectronics in 2011. The WiPoint architecture includes three different radios so that the chip is never interrupted while streaming data. Also squeezed onto the chip are circuits for interfacing with sensors that monitor heart rate and respiration.

Magar wants WiPoint to replace the billions of sensors that hospitals purchase every year, so that doctors can constantly monitor patients without wiring them down to hospital beds. Patients can leave the hospital wearing the device and simply throw it out once the coin-cell battery runs out.

Magar suggested that part of the reason that hospitals have been slow to employ wireless monitoring is the lack of hardware. The market for consumer fitness trackers from companies like Fitbit and Jawbone has stolen attention from medical-grade devices that monitor health and medical conditions, he said.

“In general, the medical world is in the stone ages,” Magar said. “And if you really want semiconductors to revolutionize something, you need a very high volume application.”

Other firms have taken that view as the size and cost of semiconductors have shrunk. Vital Connect, founded by former Marvell Semiconductor engineers, creates wireless chips for monitoring vital signs. MC10, a Boston healthcare start-up, makes similar sensors for medical research that stretch and conform to the human body.

General Electric and Phillips – two of the largest makers of patient monitors in hospitals – are also testing patches to remotely check vitals. In 2012, they were among the biggest supporters of a Federal Communications Commission ruling that opened 40 MHz of spectrum for medical body area networks, or MBANs.

Government regulators have not turned a blind eye. In 2013, the Food and Drug Administration passed guidelines for wireless hospital devices, advising companies to build secure wireless products that can’t be cross-contaminated with Wi-Fi networks used by consumer devices like smartphones.

Magar was guided by similar concerns: “In an emergency room, there may be 50 patients wearing the patches,” he said. “They are continually transmitting to a patient monitor, so how do you connect 50 channels in a room without missing a beat?”

Hmicro’s engineers were able to merge three different radios into a single WiPoint chip, so that the device always had an open passage for transmitting data. It operates primarily over Wi-Fi, but the medical band and ultra-wideband channels act like back-ups.

The company also created its own version of Wi-Fi that consumes fewer than 10 milliamps of power from the coin-cell battery. The company decided against using Bluetooth – like Vital Connect – because it was not efficient enough for constantly streaming data.

One lingering question is how the price will compare to wired sensors. Doug Linquest, HMicro’s chief marketing officer, said in an interview that the chips would be slightly more expensive, but that they would become cost-competitive after production increases. He added that the chips could further cut costs related to disinfecting reusable wires.

Magar suggested that the benefits of wireless monitoring would outweigh price concerns. And he fell back on a familiar chip industry metaphor to explain why: “It’s a little like what Wi-Fi did for Ethernet cables. It got rid of the wires and we were able to create an entirely new infrastructure.”

Correction November 3rd, 2016: An earlier version of this article misstated the power consumption of the chip's Wi-Fi radio. It draws fewer than 10 milliamps of power from the coin-cell battery, not fewer than 200 milliamps.