Blood pressure monitoring evaluation kit includes hardware and dev tools
Adding to its portfolio of healthcare products, Renesas Electronics offers a blood pressure monitoring evaluation kit with hardware and development tools for system manufacturers developing blood pressure monitor applications.
The IoT offers consumers connected tools to manage personal healthcare, for example blood pressure monitoring functions are expected to be incorporated into wearable devices. The growth of this market offers new business opportunities, but can also be challenging, particularly for system manufacturers who are new to the connected healthcare device ecosystem and may not have the built-in application-specific expertise, Renesas believes. Blood pressure measurement requires expertise such as filtering functions for extracting the waveforms required for measurement.
Renesas has developed the blood pressure monitoring evaluation kit to alleviate the development pain points, providing functions close to those used in actual blood pressure monitors thus accelerating blood pressure measurement system development.
The kit includes a pressure sensor, arm cuff, pump, electronically controlled valve, LCD panel, and a reference board that incorporates an RL78 microcontroller-based application specific standard product (ASSP) that includes analogue functions required for blood pressure measurement. Reference software provides the algorithms required for blood pressure measurement. A Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) module enables the measured data to be transmitted to a smartphone under the Continua standard blood pressure monitoring (BPM) profile.
A graphical user interface (GUI) development tool is also part of the new evaluation kit. The pressure sensor, pump, electronically controlled valve components, and pulse width modulation control can be set from the GUI tool. If the system structure is the same, the GUI tool can also be used for system evaluation of the actual application the system manufacturer is developing. According to Renesas, system manufacturers can use the evaluation kit to immediately begin system evaluations and significantly reduce development time. The IIR digital filter calculations required for extracting the pulse waveform from the cuff pressure output waveform during blood pressure measurement can also be simulated using the GUI tool. The digital filter constants calculated based on this simulation can be written from the GUI tool to the RL78/H1D firmware and verified in the actual application being developed. This significantly reduces the number of steps in the development process.
The RL78/H1D ASSP is designed to control systems required for blood pressure measurement with a single chip. It incorporates high-resolution delta sigma ADCs, programmable gain instrumentation amplifiers, DACs, operational amplifiers, and other circuits required for blood pressure measurement, as well as timers for pulse width modulation control.
The blood pressure monitoring evaluation kit can be ordered now.
