Health and Wearable technology has seen a rapid growth in the past few years, with many people now using technology to monitor themselves and a range of health monitoring applications. A few common applications include exercise motivation, the remote monitoring of patient’s health parameters such temperature (fever), blood pressure and glucose levels and the monitoring of sleep patterns.
The growth in the use of this technology has been made possible by the continuous developments of electronics which has allowed smaller, lighter more energy efficient devices which are more comfortable for the end user, offer longer battery life time and an ever increasing amount of useful data. Developments in sensor technology also means there is a wide range of cost effective sensors available, which can be used to measure all sorts of parameters including movement, environmental and on body conditions .
In addition to the developments of sensor technology, continued development of mobile devices such as phones and tablets, which now include wireless technologies such as Near Field Communication (NFC) and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) enables these smart devices to be used as the bridge between body worn technology and cloud storage/online monitoring.
WiSAR is actively involved in this area and continues to keep up to date with the latest hardware, software and RF Technologies. When working with WiSAR, the client can rest assured that their product will be using the most up to date and suitable technology. A particular strength of WiSAR in this area is on-body communications, as illustrated, and the development of compact flexible antennas for wearable applications.
WiSAR expertise including
- PCB design and layout, multilayer PCB and SMT components which are crucial for the miniaturisation body worn devices
- Embedded Systems firmware development , µcontroller including Texas Instruments, Cypress and Atmel
- Integration of sensors with electronic circuits
- RF Comms experience using Radio Frequency Identification (RFiD), Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and 868MHz/2.4GHz technologies
- Antenna design experience including on body antenna which are important for many health and wearable applications
- Database Design/Web Interface Design and Hosting
- RF testing including output power and antenna response
- Current consumption testing (sleep currents, etc) to ensure maximum battery lifetime.
WiSAR Equipment and facilitates
- CST Microwave Studio
- Altium Designer Circuit and PCB Design Software
- In-house PCB Prototyping
- Full suite of RF Test equipment including RF Spectrum Analyzer, Network Analyzer, RF Power Meters and RF Generators
- High Accuracy Bench Top Digital Multimeters
- Surface Mount Component (SMT) placement ability
- 3D SLA Printer
