Over the past couple of months I’ve been posting on how analog is shaping our future – especially over the next decade. Today let’s take a closer look at how the health technology field is evolving and how electronics are revolutionizing this industry. First and foremost, by reducing the size of medical equipment along with its power requirements, equipment has become portable so it’s no longer just in hospitals – but also in clinics, doctors’ offices and even the home. Electronic breakthroughs are beginning to make it possible to deliver health care to remote places worldwide, with easier access and lower cost. And innovation will continue to drive this trend.
Imagine a world where the technology for medical diagnosis and treatment is as mobile as a smartphone, to lower health-care costs and reduce the need for hospital stays. Following are just a few examples.
Ultrasound scanners
What if doctors could run all their scans and tests using just a few high-tech medical devices you can hold in your hand? Working closely with medical imaging experts, TI has developed a family of analog front-ends (AFEs) for ultrasound. Now, some ultrasound scanners can operate at very low power levels, and in a smaller form factor where many chips are integrated into just one. Adding wireless connectivity helps to transmit data in non-traditional environments – making it even more portable. What was once a device that had to be rolled around on a cart could be something that physicians or first responders can carry in a lab coat (Figure 2). The single-chip AFE also is enabling smaller medical electronics companies to enter the portable ultrasound market, driving down the cost of scanners which could reduce the patient costs.
Epidermal electronics
Suppose that all of a hospital patient’s electrode patches were consolidated into a single, nearly invisible, weightless version — as thin as a temporary, press-on tattoo! Further, suppose that a tiny radio transmitter eliminated the need for any wires tethering the patient to monitoring machines. “Epidermal electronics” is a term coined by researchers who have produced prototype devices at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. With technology like this, constant medical monitoring of a patient could be enabled anywhere.
For example, “wearable medical reports” are being tested to monitor everything from sleep patterns to cardiac activity. These sensors could collect vital sign data, such as heart rate, blood pressure and respiration. The information would then be transmitted to a processor worn on the body to analyze the data.
Smart pills
Developed by Fraunhofer Institute for Biomedical Engineering, pill cameras like the one shown in Figure 1 move through the digestive system with muscular contractions. A new magnetic controller could allow doctors to control and guide the camera’s precise location and position in the body. The remote control will enable doctors to conduct internal examinations of the stomach and esophagus, procedures that today use an endoscope, requiring local anesthetic and several hours of recovery time.
Researchers at the University of Florida have engineered a smart pill with a tiny antenna and microchip that could signal when it has made it into a patient's stomach – reporting to a cell phone or computer that the patient has taken the medicine. Their design is the latest of several high-tech pill-reporting efforts to improve patient adherence and provide accurate reporting.
A tiny medical device sold by Buffalo, NY-based SmartPill has received approval by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to be marketed in the United States. The electronic pill is meant to be ingested by a patient to gather information about the digestive system as it travels through, transmitting the information to a receiver worn by the patient.
The role of semiconductor components
Advances like these are rapidly making it possible to increase the affordability, quality and accessibility of health care to more people and in remote locations. But it is no surprise that technology related to health care must be especially reliable and thoroughly tested.
That is one key reason why the product life-cycle in the health care market tends to be much longer than that for consumer products (Figure 3). Despite these long product life cycles, in just two decades the performance of health care electronic devices has tripled and data storage has quadrupled. These devices are five times smaller and lighter with vastly more features at one-third the cost. This current trend in health technology is similar to what we’ve seen in computing and communications applications in the past decades.
What do you think?
With this blog series, we’ve peered into the future of industrial, automotive and health care technologies. It’s time to hear from you! Take a short survey to vote on the innovation you envision as having the greatest impact over the next decade. Feel free to add innovations that may not be on our list. Click here to take the survey. As an incentive to you, our readers, 20 respondents will be selected at random to receive a 4G thumb drive shaped like a key! Contest rules can be found here.
In my next post I’ll recap the survey results and summarize some thoughts on the coming decade. If you haven’t had a chance to check out my previous posts, following are the links:
- Engineering the world through Analog
- Analog and the new industrial revolution
- Analog drives automotive solutions