Events highlight healthcare, medical applications
Medical, healthcare, and general Internet of Things (IoT) applications were highlighted at two recent trade shows: BIOMEDevice (March 26-27 in Boston, MA) and EE Live (April 1-3 in San Jose, CA).
Speaking March 27 at BIOMEDevice, Bill Betten, vice president of business solutions at Logic PD, commented that the penetration of mobile health technology will keep pace with the growing popularity of smartphone technology. In 2017, Betten said, there will be as many smartphones in consumers’ hands as there are all types of phones today, and smartphones are amenable to mobile healthcare applications.
Evolving technologies will lead to better efficiencies, lower costs, and improved patient results, Betten said. However, he stated, home medical technologies must be portable, easy to use, and connected to avoid isolated islands of information. Therefore, the devices will need to support remote monitoring via Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, NFC, or other communications links to support connectivity to the cloud and onward to trusted evaluators. He added that an accessory also might offer a wired connection or physically attach to a smartphone.
Betten cited several home healthcare device examples: AliveCor’s AliveECG, the Withings blood pressure monitor, the iBGStar blood glucose monitoring system, the Airstrip patient monitoring system, the iStethoscope Pro (which turns an iPhone into a stethoscope), and the Tandem t:slim insulin pump.
Betten said medical device manufacturers are occupying one end of a product development spectrum while consumer electronics makers occupy the other, and both will be attempting to make headway into the middle ground.
Building blocks at EE Live
From whatever end of the spectrum they represent, engineers looking to build medical and healthcare products may have found appropriate building blocks to incorporate into their designs at EE Live. The offerings ranged from processor IP to board- and system-level products.
Imagination Technologies, for example, chose EE Live to highlight its product offerings for healthcare, IoT, and wearable applications. The provider of IP for multimedia, communications, and 3-D graphics applications presented a variety of offerings related to MIPS, which it recently acquired.
Highlighted products included the MIPS Warrior highly scalable family of CPUs, such as the new MIPS M-class M51xx cores, which have features that make them suitable for IoT and wearables like a DSP engine, small code size, hardware virtualization support, and ultra-secure processing.
The company also displayed IoT and wearable-related products and technologies, including the Toumaz SensiumVitals System, an ultralow power wireless patch remotely managed via Imagination’s FlowCloud technology.
National Instruments highlighted a variety of applications areas ranging from machine vision to wireless communications at EE Live. In the medical area, NI presented Biomed Simulation’s Califia Perfusion Simulator System, which simulates a patient’s heart and lungs to permit the training and evaluation of perfusionists. The system makes use of an NI single-board RIO in combination with Cyth Systems’ CircaFlex embedded-control system. The simulator provides an example showing how domain experts can leverage the LabVIEW RIO architecture to focus on their specific area of expertise, from battery simulation to improving medical training, without the need for low-level knowledge of FPGA programming. Cyth Systems is a National Instruments Alliance Partner that helped Biomed Simulation build the system.
Another EE Live exhibitor specifically mentioning health and medical applications was Icon Labs, a provider of embedded networking and security technology, which announced a suite of offerings that can provide an umbrella of protection for RTOS-based end points. The company’s cross-platform Intrusion Detection and Prevention runs natively in a range of RTOS-based devices found in military, utility, industrial, medical, and consumer IoT applications. Intrusion Detection and Prevention is provided through RTOS specific threat detection and advanced packet filtering. Also, Inforce Computing presented Snapdragon-based products and accessories that support innovations in the fields of robotics, health-care, and audio/video processing and analytics.
In addition, many companies presented general-purpose IoT-related products, including sensors, connectivity devices, and processing capabilities that could have broad application to medical and health applications. (See the special report on remote monitoring.)
Where it leads
Toward where will advances in medical and healthcare technology lead? You might suspect we will soon live forever, based on a March 27 BIOMEDevice presentation by Barmak Heshmat, a post-doctorate associate at the MIT Media Lab, titled “Before your immortality!” The idea of an elixir of life is thousands of years old, he said, adding that although immortality is not possible, life can be extended and wellbeing improved. We can rely on physics, he said, to repair and preserve the body. Technology, he said, can help improve mental balance, promote physical exercise, and even monitor food quality. As a specific example, he cited the Zensorium tinke—at the touch of a finger, the tinke measures heart rate, respiratory rate, blood oxygen saturation level, and heart-rate variability.