Interconnected medical devices require interactivity

In the early stages of industry development, telemedicine mainly involves patients communicating remotely with doctors through applications on computers or smartphones, and more importantly, achieving medical consultation. With the increasing attention of society to chronic diseases and aging issues, medical devices based on mobile internet have entered the service chain and can provide professional medical services such as monitoring and diagnosis.

Visualization is a very important function in interconnected medical devices. Taking the digital Stethoscope as an example, the traditional Stethoscope does not have visibility and can only be judged by doctors through experience, so it is only used by doctors. As can be seen from the figure below, the digital Stethoscope is actually a highly intelligent connected medical device, which can be used by patients at home, and then can improve the efficiency of diagnosis and treatment by remote communication with doctors based on the obtained cardiopulmonary data. In addition, some interconnected medical devices also require voice interaction capabilities in consultation systems.

At the same time, with the improvement of intelligence level, interconnected medical devices will integrate a lot of functions, which puts forward high requirements for the interface resources and integration level of core devices. Moreover, due to the fact that interconnected medical devices are mostly used by users at home, their cost is also a challenge.

Multifunctionality of devices is the trend

In remote medical applications, the elderly population accounts for a relatively high proportion of user groups. Therefore, in the "Notice on Further Implementing Measures to Facilitate Medical Treatment for the Elderly" issued by the National Health Commission, it is emphasized that in order to address the digital divide faced by the elderly in the process of seeking medical treatment, medical institutions such as internet hospitals need to undergo aging adaptation transformation, simplify the online appointment process, and facilitate the selection of internet medical services for the elderly through voice input and additional channels for manual services.

On the device side, because the elderly have entered the decline period of physical function, the probability of infection with various diseases has increased significantly compared with Young adult, and the basic diseases of the body itself are more complex, which requires that the connected medical devices have more functions as far as possible, and the operation should achieve "foolishness". Of course, due to the complexity of diseases in the elderly, these devices need to be able to provide functions such as remote consultation, remote consultation, and nursing teaching.

With such a system, it can improve the diagnosis and medical level of the elderly, reduce medical expenses, and meet the health needs of the general public. However, in the face of such a feature-rich system, people may worry about choosing the main chip, and if they choose it carelessly, they may even need multiple chips to meet their needs. Here, we recommend the i.MX 6SoloX ARM processor, also from manufacturer NXP, which can meet the needs of feature-rich applications on a single chip. On the Maoze electronic platform, you can search for part number MCIMX6X4EVM10AC and see a complete introduction on the device's details page.

i. MX 6SoloX ARM processor uses Arm ® Cortex ®- A9 and Cortex ®- M4 core construction. The Cortex-A9 kernel can run complex OS systems, in conjunction with the NEON SIMD media accelerator, as well as resources such as GPU 2D/3D, camera interface, PiXel processing pipeline (PXP), and can be used to build application rich systems; The Cortex-M4 core has real-time response and system control functions. Therefore, overall, this series of processors can be used to create application rich systems with real-time response.

Safety and high energy efficiency are two major product features of the i. MX 6SoloX ARM processor. Among them, the security resources of the device include security message units (MU), multi-core isolation and sharing, resource domain controllers (RDCs), etc; The device integrates some PMUs internally and is supported by NXP MMPF0100 and MMPF0200.

Portable brings power consumption challenges

The continuous enrichment of application requirements and the continuous improvement of related technologies have made portability an important product feature of interconnected medical devices. The Sphygmomanometer, Glucose meter, ventilator and ECG monitor that can be used at home are almost all more or less portable. However, portability also means battery power, which poses a challenge to the battery life of interconnected medical devices.

Under moderate or heavy load conditions, the TLV62569 buck converter operates in pulse width modulation (PWM) mode with a switching frequency of 1.5MHz; Under light load conditions, the device automatically enters energy-saving mode (PSM), thereby maintaining high efficiency throughout the entire load current range; When turned off, the current consumption decreases to below 2 µ A. In addition to high energy efficiency, the device also provides protection functions such as overcurrent protection and thermal shutdown protection.

Obstacles to the popularization of interconnected medical devices

With the rapid growth of the telemedicine market, the future development of connected medical devices is foreseeable. However, as mentioned by the World Health Organization, we are currently in a period of digital technology innovating traditional healthcare, and market development is inevitably facing various problems.

For interconnected medical devices, especially those used in home scenarios, high device vacancy rates are a typical problem. The fundamental reason for this is twofold. Firstly, professional hospitals do not provide sufficient support for telemedicine. Professor Zhang Meikui, the director of the Remote Medicine Center of the General Hospital of the People's Liberation Army, stated in 2019 that according to his observation, less than 20% of hospitals nationwide supported remote medical consultations, which resulted in the inability to effectively interpret the professional data provided by the equipment, and a test is equivalent to no test.

Secondly, the equipment itself is not proficient in the use of medical Big data. At present, the medical Big data platform is faced with the challenges of data magnanimity, complexity, and accuracy of results. Because the data use is linked to diagnosis, treatment, and monitoring, the threshold of platform construction is further raised, making many functions of the current connected medical devices still need the help of professional doctors to work.

However, the good news is that both policies and industries recognize the value of telemedicine and are actively promoting it. In this process, the ease of use of interconnected medical devices will also be significantly improved, and the empowerment of 5G+AI technology will open a new chapter in industrial development.