Tuesday, August 9, 2011

Renesas, Glucose, Kit Renesas offers glucose meter demo kit

MANHASSET, NY -- Renesas Electronics America has made its Continua demonstration platform available at a level of power efficiency that ensures long battery life.

The platform is based on the Renesas Electronics V850 microcontroller with certified Continua Blood Glucose agent software.

V850 MCUs, at about 350uA/DMIPS with up to 1 MB of flash memory and integrated USB function support, make it possible to handle the added software load without sacrificing the long battery life that end users have come to expect, according to Renesas.

By eliminating the error-prone process of manually collecting measurement data, Continua blood glucose meters as defined by the Continua Health Alliance help improve the quality of medical data and diagnosis.

The challenge in implementing these devices is that collecting and communicating the data adds a significant software burden to existing medical products. This software burden could become a human burden if the people who use these devices every day have to replace batteries frequently.

As an example, Renesas Electronics’s 32-bit V850ES/Jx3-L MCUs relieve this burden with an extraordinarily high energy efficiency — 1.9 DMIPS/MHz — which enables the V850 devices to process more than other MCUs at a lower frequency.

The demonstration platform implements a set of guidelines for blood glucose meters developed by the Continua Health Alliance — a non-profit industry organization dedicated to establishing connected and interoperable personal health solutions.

Alliance guidelines utilize key industry standards to ensure an end-to-end architecture from personal medical devices to hospital information systems. One such standard is ISO/IEEE 11073, which defines a medical device, the measurements that it makes, and a protocol for communicating the measurement data. For the underlying communication transport method, the Continua guidelines specify open standards such as USB, Bluetooth  and ZigBee.

While the Continua demonstration platform uses USB, the V850ES/Jx3-L MCUs can also support Bluetooth and ZigBee functionality.

The Renesas Electronics V850 Continua demonstration platform runs software from Lamprey Networks Inc., developer of the reference code for the Continua Health Alliance. The software used in the platform has been certified by the Continua Health Alliance and is portable across multiple Renesas Electronics MCUs. Because the software is targeted to a specific type of medical device, the software footprint can be optimized.

The Continua Demonstration Platform for Renesas Electronics V850 MCUs is available now.
Renesas, Glucose, Kit Renesas offers glucose meter demo kit

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