Home portable medical electronic devices of different design (1)

Global population ageing and health care costs soaring up spurred on home healthcare solutions in the huge market demand.

With the smaller, cheaper and portable home care technology substitution large expensive equipment to market on the growing number of health care products, and the development of semiconductor technology contributed to the popularity of home health care and cost reduction.

This number is very alarming.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO) statistics, 2006 Global 50-year-old and above the population is 6.5 billion, and it is expected that by 2025 this figure will reach 12 million. Only in the United States, 65 years old in a proportion of the population is rising, and is expected to rise in the future.

Healthcare market is very large.

According to the United States Government, the United States in healthcare expenditures 2.5 trillion, representing the entire national GDP of 18%. ABI Research company predicts that 2014 will be 5,900 million units to wear home healthcare equipment in use, then the total number of worn equipment will reach 4.2 million units, including sports and fitness equipment.

Freedonia Group company believes that currently home healthcare equipment worth far more than $ 7 billion, covering technologies including respiratory therapy and intravenous (IV) injection, dialysis, patient care, wheelchair, assisted walking, medical equipment and safety equipment.

Today's medical equipment to provide the patient with lower cost and more secure way of monitoring, in some cases even in their own homes with their health, reduced to a hospital, clinic or doctor's Office.

Healthcare is becoming more and more decentralized.

Portable home healthcare equipment including blood glucose, blood pressure, heart rate monitors, digital thermometer, pulse oximetry saturated instrument, used in the treatment of asthma and other respiratory diseases, asthma, for older persons and persons with disabilities falls and motion detection equipment, as well as for weight monitoring, and management of digital scales, there are also used to treat sleep apnea devices.

Many home fitness equipment also increased by upgrading and management of health measuring.

For medical device of semiconductor technology

In Internet connectivity, performance and integrated semiconductor IC has been greatly enhanced, thereby driving the home healthcare equipment innovation.

Interestingly, these semiconductor IC development saved thousands of lives, and many people are living longer, which further increased the demand for health care, and added more medical innovation needs.

Architects can give full play to the sensor, microcontroller units (MCU), microprocessors and DSP, analog front ends, memory, power IC and transmitter and receiver functions.

FPGA can implement many features. These solutions can achieve very high functional integration.

Many IC features is driving the trend in home health care, especially processor and advanced sensor.

For example, the DSP has high computing capacity that can be used to enable next-generation monitoring products.

Advanced accelerometer, such as analog devices ' iMEMS Triaxial ADXL345 digital accelerometer, are widely used in millions of computer games, navigation devices, cellular phones, automotive applications and other consumer products.

These accelerometer ensures home digital blood pressure monitor accuracy. They can be detected and ensure measuring arm relative to the correct location of the patient's heart, so as to achieve maximum measurement accuracy.

Pulse Oximeter is recently joined the household healthcare monitoring camp equipment, oxygen saturation is the blood pressure, heart rate, respiratory rate and body temperature after the fifth important tizheng.

Oximeter to measure hemoglobin carries oxygen content. Erythrocyte hemoglobin is an important part of the oxygen from the lungs to the body throughout the organization.

Pulse Oximeter (Figure 1) can take a number of traditional IC to design, on the company.

On three years ago acquired the leading manufacturer of advanced custom IC AMI Semiconductor company. Some semiconductor IC manufacturers can provide home health care application required a complete signal chain function.

Figure 1: Pulse Oximeter can use traditional IC design, on the Pulse Oximeter programme provides a block diagram of the IC in Brown.

"We develop AD5933 impedance analysis chip can be used to measure such as body fat and blood coagulation degree and other parameters, the output can be linked to communication with doctor's home care Terminal.

"ADI Healthcare Division global strategic marketing manager Paul Errico," it's just we can provide portable home healthcare products in complete signal chain (Figure 2) one of the IC. ”

Home healthcare equipment market to design engineers presented many challenges, including low power consumption and longer battery life, robust and powerful data processing power, more friendly and simple user operation, wireless connectivity and lower the cost of end users.

Semiconductor IC manufacturers are increasingly faced with these challenges.