Healthcare Wireless and Device Connectivity

West Wireless Health Institute receives $45M boost

SAN DIEGO - The West Wireless Health Institute one of the world's first medical research organizations dedicatd to advancing health and well-being through the use of wireless technologies has received at $45M contribution from the Gary and Mary West Foundation.

The foundation is a non-profit, grant making organization based in Carlsbad, CA. Its founder and chariman Gary West will serve on the West Wireless Health Instituate board of directors.

West will be joined by Eric J. Topal, holder of the Gary and Mary West chair of Innovative Medicine and chief academic officer at Scripps Health, a nonprofit community-based healthcare delivery network in San Diego, and Donald Jones, vice president of Health and Life Sciences at Qualcomm, a San Diego based provider of digital wireless communications.

"We believe this emerging field will completely transform healthcare as we know it", said West.  "The institute aims to be the catalyst to move ideas and concepts quickly into reality, bringing cost-effective wireless health solutions to doctors, patients, and their families.

" The rapid and remarkable progress in wireless sensors - continually tracking important parameters such as blood sugar, blood pressure, all vital signs, sleep state and even caloric intake and expenditure - has the potential to change medicine in a radical and unprecendented way, " said Topol. "Not only does this fit the optimal models of individualized and consumer-driven healthcare, but there is tremendous potential to upgrade quality of care, reduce the cost burden and shift away from reactive to preventive medicine.

http://www.healthcareitnews.com

ULP set for Dramatic Growth

Wherever you look, wireless in all it's forms but especialy short-range, ultra-low power (ULP), is set to explode.  The technology will spread far beyond traditional communications and data networking sectors into the consumer, industrial, manufacturing, medical, retail, and service sectors.  ULP wireless is set for dramatic growth because it's the enabler for unobstrusive, low maintenance, low cost wireless sensors that can form star or mesh networks.  The applications for the sport, wellness, medical, industrial and domestic sectors is only limited by the designers imagination.  However, because of it's strict power constraints, ULP is beyond the reach of standards based solutions such as the current versions of Bluetooth or ZigBee.

 

 

Download NS_ULP_WQ_Q208_eR.pdf

Why RFID in 2008 and who are the innovators?

Go to www.RFIDswitchboard.com 

Also as Texas Instruments States, "What competition?"

The new TI-RIFD TRF796x HF Reader IC sells itself with the highest performance and lower power consumption.  As TI is the leader in this space, the wide 2.7v to 5.5v input supply rnage integration enables a reduction in the bill of materials, while decreasing system costs.  The low power IC with selectable power modes allows for maximizing battery life.  This lower design will more than likely lend intself to the desing of ultra small reader modules and systems for medical applications.

www.ti.com/rfid

Ultra Low Power WIFI via Sensors and Embedded Applications.

Finally, it seems the game changer for the power consumption heavy 802.11a/b/g client.  Maybe this also changes the game for Zigbee to to certain extent.  Sensor networks to leverage enterprise WLAN as the backbone, just seems that the ROI is there and it makes sense. Especially, if you can extend to a 10 year battery life.

GainSpan brings Ultra-low-power Wi-Fi to sensors and embedded applications. The company's semiconductor solutions break new ground in Wi-Fi applications by enabling years of battery life for

Wi-Fi sensors and other devices.

In September of 2006, a core team of engineers and thought leaders spun off from Intel Corporation to form GainSpan. The vision was simple... enable and accelerate the adoption of new wireless usage models for sensor network applications using an existing widely deployed standard technology.

The challenge was daunting... while wireless sensor networks have seen steady growth over the past few years, their market potential has, in fact, been hindered by power consumption issues and lack of mature standards based solutions.

The solution was innovative... new Wi-Fi semiconductor and software solutions that enable sensors and other devices to run up to 10 years on a single AA battery. This allows users to leverage the global Wi-Fi infrastructure, existing tools and knowledge investments, for new applications such as temperature monitoring for energy management, condition monitoring of industrial equipment in manufacturing plants or streetlights in metro areas.

GainSpan's mission is to continue to innovate around these basic tenets to create a broad range of semiconductor solutions that can improve usage capabilities worldwide and enable deployment of products that leverage the pervasiveness of Wi-Fi.

Medical Body Area Network Service

This is provided as support of the proposal by General Electric Corporation which has found support with IEEE P802.15 TG6 (Body Area Networks), IEEE P802.15-08-0069-01-0006.  Please see Ex Parte of GE Healthcare in ET Docket No. 06-135 (December 27, 2007) (citing the potential benefits of a new Medical Body Area Network Service (“MBANS”), spectrum allocation and proposing MBANS under Part 95 of the Commission’s rules), (“GE Healthcare Ex Parte”). The need to support the technical requirements of a Medical Body Area Network is vital to improve the process re-engineering of healthcare delivery surrounding the patient.  This additionally reduces risk mitigation in the reduction of the cabling infrastructure surrounding the patient and lowers overall patient use cost models both in the ambulatory and critical care delivery models. To accomplish this it is important to consider the overall spectrum that will decrease any potential for EMI, (electromagnetic interference), and also provide the highest level quality of service. Quality of service being defined as bandwidth dedicated to the MBANS and not a shared medium with other unlicensed services and/or frequencies. This cannot be accomplished by sharing the traditional 802.11a/b/g/n (2412MHz-2484MHz/5180MHz-5805MHz) WLAN (Wireless LAN) model or even WMTS (Wireless Medical Telemetry Services (608-614MHz/1395-1400MHz/1427-1432MHz).  Dedicating the use of 40MHz from 2360MHz to 2400MHz will ensure peaceful co-existence and non-interference for this medical application. As a life critical spectrum space and design, there will be a requirement and strict parameters for the use.  For example all stations will need to employ an unrestricted contention based protocol, the maximum emission bandwidth will be 1MHz, the maximum EIRP (Equivalent Isotropically Radiated Power) will not exceed the lesser of 1mW or 10 log BW _{20db MHz} dBm and the same out of band (more than 500 kHz outside of band), field strength limits as applies to MICS (Medical Implant Communication Services 402-405MHz).   Since this is not proprietary to a specific company but driven as an industry standard as a whole, all respective patient monitoring companies and ultimately the end user in the integrated delivery network will benefit from its adoption. Time to market and NRE (Non-Recurring Engineering), will be much lower as there will be industry collaborative efforts and ultra low power Bluetooth, (2400-2483.5MHz) Zigbee/802.15.4 (2400-2483.5MHz) and/or other GFSK (Gaussian Frequency Shift Keying) transceivers radio chipsets from Intel and/or Texas Instruments or similar like companies can be easily modified.  The use of 802.11a/b/g/n is not recommended due to power consumption for a mobile device as well the stated aforementioned shared medium (bandwidth) concerns.   It will be important to engage 802.18 TAG to convey objectives of 802.15.6 and benefit this overall proposal. It is highly encouraged that the FCC continue toward a notice of proposed rule making

Wireless Vital Signs Platform

ST+D has developed a Wireless Vital Signs Platform which is optimised for unobtrusive wear by ambulatory patients.

www.std-ltd.com

Innovative Wireless Automations Sensors for Arrhythmmia Monitoring

IMEC smart ECG patch.  The reality of wireless sensors is upon us. 

http://www.imec.be

14-07-2008 - Leuven, Belgium -- In the framework of Holst Centre, IMEC has further extended the functionality of its wireless ECG patch for cardiac monitoring. It added wave analysis software locally on the patch node. The algorithm achieves excellent results for sensitivity and predictivity, and covers a broad range of wave morphologies. The innovative ECG patch is intended to monitor single-lead ECG in daily-life conditions, opening new perspectives for cardiovascular disease management. Besides technological advancements, IMEC also announces National Semiconductor, a specialist in energy-efficient analog integrated circuits, as a new partner within its Human++ program.

IMEC’s wireless ECG patch is a wearable, wire-free system easy to set-up. It removes disturbances and discomfort caused by current cardiac monitoring systems. The hybrid system combines electronic assembly on flexible polyimide substrate and integration in textile. This enables flexibility in one dimension and stretchability in the other, which is required for optimal personal comfort. The patch features IMEC’s proprietary ultralow-power biopotential ASIC (application specific integrated circuit) to extract the bio-potential signals produced during the ECG measurements, a commercial microcontroller and a 2.4GHz radio link. The patch can continuously monitor the patient’s heart at a sample rate of up to 1KHz. It sends the results directly to the receiver, or it can analyze the signals locally before sending them. Local analysis reduces the use of the radio, improving the autonomy of the patch. The current autonomy with local delineation is 10 days of continuous monitoring.

The algorithm embedded in the system performs the delineation of the ECG signal, i.e. the detection of the important electrical waves from the heart. The delineator is able to identify P,Q, R, S, and T wave peaks and boundaries. Since the intervals and amplitudes of these waves contain most of the useful information of the ECG, this delineation will provide quick and useful information to the healthcare provider. The delineator on the ECG patch has been validated over all the recordings in the MIT QT database (a database developed by MIT which includes ECGs chosen to represent a wide variety of QRS and ST-T morphologies, in order to challenge QT detection algorithms with real-world variability). IMEC’s ECG patch achieves a 99.93% sensitivity and a 98.28% positive predictivity for QRS detection on 86994 beats. For delineation over 3623 beats, it reaches a 99.83% sensitivity and a 95.08% positive predictivity.

IMEC’s Human++ program develops technology for wireless autonomous sensor systems that can be used for health and wellness monitoring. Such systems will for example enable analysis of people with sleep apnea from home or monitor epilepsy patients in an ambulatory setting. The program was launched in 2002 and got a considerable boost in 2005 when IMEC decided to house it in Holst Centre, a new research center set up together with the Dutch research institute TNO under impulse of the Dutch government.