Good health! Low power micro drives medical wellbeing

2nd October 2014

Mick Elliott

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Datasheet

Health and fitness are burgeoning markets for the electronics industry – whether it’s checking your pulse rate after a 100 lengths of the pool or enabling ultrasounds to be undertaken in the home rather than necessitating a trip to hospital. Covering all the bases is difficult. “We went out and spoke to our customers about their opportunities to give us a focus for our developments,” says Chris Neil, Senior Vice President, Industrial and Medical Solutions Group at Maxim Integrated Products.

The outcome of these deliberations is Maxim’s Wellness Platform which it will preview at electronica 2014. Demonstrating Maxim’s commitment to the wearables market, this is a suite of design hardware and software, including the WASP/MAX32600 microcontroller unit (MCU), for wearable medical applications.

The platform will enhance performance, lower R&D costs and shorten time to market. Wearable medical and fitness devices empower people to live healthier lives. To enable the comfort, wearability, and effectiveness of new body-worn devices, Maxim is coordinating a company-wide initiative to develop products for wearable solutions. The Wellness Platform provides power and battery management, digital processing, highly integrated sensors, ultra-low-power communications, and industry-leading security. With wellness applications developing quickly, Maxim will continue to expand this product portfolio. At the heart of the Wellness Platform is the MAX32600, an ARM Cortex-M3 low-power microcontroller. It integrates precision analogues performance with high level security features. As Neil observes, “There cannot be any data corruption, we are dealing with confidential sensitive medical information.”

The integrated Trust Protection Unit features onboard public key authentication, data encryption, and tamper detection, ensuring data cannot be compromised. Requiring minimal discretes, the onboard, highly configurable analogue front-end (AFE) includes high current LED drivers and facilitates one or more wellness metric measurements, such as heart rate monitoring (HRM) and galvanic skin response (GSR).

The MAX32600 is available in 192-ball, 12mm x 12mm CTBGA, 120-ball, 7mm x 7mm CTBGA, and 108-ball WLP packages. On parade at electronica will be a quartet of Wellness development platform examples. The Wellness Watch was co-developed with a Maxim partner, Logic PD. It is a low-power, highly integrated, sleek wearable watch incorporating several components from the platform. It allows users to monitor heart rate, oxygen level, movement, position, temperature, and mood response.

The Pulse Oximetry Patch measures blood oxygen content saturation while residing in an unobtrusive, mobile unit.

Serious athletes may appreciate the Fit 2 Shirt, which communicates over a Bluetooth connection, measures electrocardiogram response, blood pressure, temperature, blood oxygen content, heart rate, and activity level to provide the ultimate wearable fitness experience. It is smaller, more accurate, more secure, and has a longer battery life than its previous generation.

The NFC Temperature Patch, featuring the MAX66242 DeepCover Secure Authenticator chip, is a passive NFC tag that remotely measures temperature while using energy harvesting as the power source.