Incredible Shrinking Medical Devices
Increasing healthcare costs, the prevalence of chronic diseases, an aging “baby boomer” community, and large emerging markets in countries such as China, India, and Brazil, are creating tremendous demand for affordable, robust, and reliable medical devices to improve the treatment and care of millions of patients worldwide, and to cure an increasing range of diseases. In turn, medical device designers are exploring new technologies from various industries to improve the diagnostic, monitoring, and therapeutic capabilities of next-generation devices.
Whether talking about home-based testing, monitoring and diagnostics, clinical equipment, or imaging applications, two trends have emerged to make medical devices more affordable and more accessible for patients: miniaturization and portability. Today, medical manufacturers are moving entire systems—from home-based and clinical devices to imaging applications—into a portable unit the size of a cell phone or smaller. What was once huge equipment tethered to a wall has become available in mobile clinics, ambulances, and in a doctor’s bag for house calls.
With the trends toward miniaturization and portability come implications for reliability, form factor, power consumption, and battery life when considering the semiconductor technologies used in medical applications. To read this paper, click here.
Tags: Actel
July 6th, 2009 at 10:45 am
Dramatic changes in technology through miniaturization and portability are very much welcomed, however the biggest challenge is making them affordable. I’m hopeful that these improvements in semiconductor technology will effectively deliver the benefits we desire in a reasonable time frame.