For a customer in the health care domain, there was a requirement to develop a prototype for a patient health monitor system to sample data and send it to a central server. The system is deployable in the mass consumer market was required to be capable of running continuously for several days and very stable. And the prototype has to be demonstrated to potential investors in a short period with all features working. Being a proven partner in medical device engineering services, Embien was tasked with the responsibility of making the prototype both medical electronics design and health monitor software.
Embien has rich experience in working in quick 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 begin identifying hardware and software components of the system. For want of quick medical electronics 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.
The data was made available from multiple COTS modules and was collected by the eStormC1. 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.
As the hardware is being made ready, the RAPIDSEA library was used to quickly enable immediate access of all the driver and application modules of the eStorm-C1 platform. With Flint IDE, the whole system can be conveniently designed and minor logic added to complete the overall requirement.
The data collected from various sensor units are then pushed to the central server over WiFi as web requests. Unique Identifiers were provided to each system for identification during server interaction. The data were also internally stored for future reference.
A web dashboard unit was created and accumulated data are shown in attractive widgets. The design was kept flexible for easier expansion in features and functionality.
Thus Embien Technologies successfully developed the health monitor prototype for the customer in the given time including the medical electronics design and health monitor software. One more customer made happy! Do let us know how we can help you in your medical device design and development or rapid prototype development.
