Freescale preps home health hub platform
By R Colin Johnson, EE Times -- EDN, November 16, 2011
PORTLAND, Ore -- As medical sensors monitoring both people and their environment proliferate, Freescale Semiconductor aims to reintegrate them with a Home Health Hub (HHH) reference design that handles all popular wired and wireless protocols -- a kind of universal router for connecting cloud computers to home health care.At the MEDICA conference (Dusseldorf, Germany, November 16-19, 2011) Freescale will describe how its HHH integrates WiFi, Ethernet, USB, Bluetooth, and ZigBee into a single router that connects medical sensors (inputs), to tablet displays (outputs), to medical analytics in the clouds (processing) and to doctors advise online.
The HHH aggregates medical monitoring devices -- such as blood pressure monitors, blood glucometers, weight scales, pulse oximeters, and similar -- for cloud computers which can store the data for display to doctors, as well as run analytics the results of which can be displayed directly on the patient's on their tablet display, such as advising an insulin injection to a diabetic from a glucose reading. The HHH's intelligent iMX-28 processor -- based on an ARM-9 core -- can also communicate sensor readings directly to tablets for display as well as securely share health data with service providers.
"The World Health Organization claims there are hundreds of millions of chronic disease patents worldwide -- over 75% of our healthcare spending," said Steven Dean, Freescale's Global Healthcare segment leader. "Remote patient monitoring devices based on Freescale's Home Health Hub can cut health care costs by allowing patients to remain at home, as well as provide peace of mind for family members."
The HHH is compatible with Continua medical devices including blood pressure monitors, pulse oximeters, and weight scales. It is also compatible with Microsoft's HealthVault cloud computer service which can log medical data to secure online repositories that lets users organize, store, and share health information with their doctors. The HHH also includes a "panic button" capability that uses a sub-1 GHz radio to activate a personal emergency response system (PERS) with the HHH.
The HHH is software is compatible with Android, Linux, Windows Embedded Compact 7, and QNX's Neutrino realtime operating system (RTOS) on the i.MX-53 Sabre tablet platform.
This story was originally posted by EE Times.
Talkback
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I look forward to evaluating Freescale's new reference design, as we are in the telehealth space with our Waldo Health Platform. I agree with Paul Sherman that connectivity is incredibly important! That's why we have spent a lot of development time making this work correctly. I feel badly for Mr. Sherman that his vendor likes to point fingers. We take responsibility for the entire communications chain: sensor to Waldo (USB or Bluetooth or ZigBee), then Waldo to our secure servers using Wi-Fi, 3G, 4G, Ethernet, or P.O.T.S. (plain old telephone system). You have to "own" the entire product - even your ecosystem partner's performance - or else Clinicians will dread the day they met you. The details really *do* matter!
Alan R. Weiss - 2011-23-11 11:26:05 PST -
Perhaps I'm being a bit cynical here...
I'm currently involved with dealing with issues involving this type of system from another vendor, one that has already received FDA approval for their device.
Guess what? It ain't working so pretty good. While it's easy to say the hub communicates with the medical device, who's responsible when the communications go awry? Right now, we have the hub and glucometer vendors point fingers at each other. In the meantime, our poor patients are left high and dry.
In another incident, the hub didn't release the telephone so the patient's significant other tried to call 911 (while the patient was unconcious).
It's one thing to claim things work, but when non-medical companies make the claim, I get scared.
Paul Sherman - 2011-16-11 13:37:01 PST
