CASE STUDY SNAPSHOT
Customer : A Multidisciplinary Fortune 500 company working in the field of medical, industrial and aerospace segmentsSize : 1000 - 10000
Project vertical : Medical Electronics
Challenge : To develop a rapid patient health monitor prototype for an internal stakeholder validation
Solution : Leverage Embien's eStorm-C1 platform along with RAPIDSEA, Flint IDE and COTS sensors for rapid prototyping of multi parameter monitor
Services Availed : Turnkey Product Engineering, Flint IDE, RAPIDSEA
Tools and Technologies :
- MCU : NXP LPC1769
- Frameworks : MCUExpresso, RAPIDSEA
- Programming Language : C
- Compiler : GCC
- Tools : Flint
INTRODUCTION
This customer is a long-term associate, with Embien assisting them in various developments spanning different verticals. One of their New Product Development teams in the medical sector wanted to develop a cloud solution for which the data could be obtained from a real medical device. This case study explains how Embien supported rapid prototyping of the patient health monitor.
CHALLENGE
The team wanted to showcase the product concept to their internal stake holder in a short span of 6 weeks. Though the product could be of large form factor and not compliant with any standards, it had to be fully functional to realize the end-to-end features. Embien took up the challenge of this short development cycle and successfully executed the same.
SOLUTION
The overall requirement was to develop a prototype for a patient health monitor system to sample data and send it to a central server. The device should be a multi parameter monitor with sensors for acquiring the patient vitals such as ECG, BP, heart rate and SpO2.
Multi parameter monitor design
Embien has rich experience in working in rapid prototyping for various products across industries - flow meters, data acquisition kits, wearable devices, etc. Based on the requirements, Embien medical device design and development team began identifying hardware and software components of the system. For want of quick patient health monitor design, it was decided to use COTS modules for the product. Our eStorm-C1 platform is used as the overall management unit. Various other modules for acquisition of SpO2, NiBP, Temperature etc. are added to complement the functionalities. The overall system block diagram is given below.
Patient Health Monitor Prototype
The multi parameter monitor data was made available from multiple COTS modules and was collected by the eStormC1. The device had Wi-Fi connectivity for communicating with the remote central server where internally stored data will be pushed at the configured periodicity. The device also communicates with the handheld mobile unit with 7 inches display for presenting the vitals graphically.
Other Communication modes include Serial, ZigBee, digital inputs, etc. A ZigBee based fall-detection wearable unit was also incorporated. The Real-Time Clock (RTC) maintained the time and was used to remind the user of the collection time. Also, audio/video indications are provided for easy interaction with the system.
Patient Health Monitor software
As the hardware is being made ready, the RAPIDSEA library was used to quickly enable immediate access to all the driver and application modules of the eStorm-C1 platform. With custom serial protocol configuration supported by RAPIDSEA, it was possible to integrate many of the medical sensor devices. With Flint IDE, the whole system can be conveniently designed, and minor logic added to complete the overall requirement. With Flint Visual programmer, data conversion was done graphically and consolidated.
The data collected from various sensor units are then pushed to the central server over Wi-Fi as web requests. Once again, the RAPIDSEA and Flint Combo were utilized to integrate with the Azure back end with ease. Unique Identifiers were provided to each system for identification during server interaction. The data were also internally stored for future reference.
The customer created a web dashboard unit and accumulated data are shown in attractive widgets. The design was kept flexible for easier expansion in features and functionality.
BENEFITS
Being a proven partner in medical device engineering services, Embien fulfilled its responsibility of making the patient health monitor prototype along with the Multi parameter monitor software. Some of the advantages we offered to our customer are.
- Quick prototyping with ready to use COTS modules
- Multiple Sensor interfaces connected to get holistic patient information
- Reliable data transmission to cloud for further processing
- ZigBee interface for interfacing with customer’s devices
CONCLUSION
And the prototype has to be demonstrated to stakeholders in a short period with all features working.