Transforming casual clothing into an arsenal of medical-monitoring equipment.

Imagine a world in which your shirts are on closer terms with your doctor than you are.

That’s just one of the possibilities as wearable medical electronics and other next-generation medical applications come on the scene.

Among the key technologies behind such advances are ultra-low-power microcontrollers, which are highly integrated chips that oversee the computation and movement of data associated with some narrow range of tasks.

• In the shirt example, for instance, the garment might be outfitted to monitor your blood pressure, heart rate and respiration. It would then transmit the date wirelessly to your doctor via your smartphone once a day – or quite a bit more contact than the typical patient has with his or her doctor.
• Small enough to be hidden in a seam of a shirt, TI microcontrollers can just as easily be embedded in eyeglasses frames, where they could one day operate retinal implants that restore some eyesight to those who are blind – just as cochlear implants already provide a measure of hearing to those who are hearing impaired.
• Portable glucose monitoring is another area ripe for microcontroller-based technology. Designed to help people with diabetes stay on top of their condition, glucose monitors make measurements up to six times a day, but they take less than a minute each time. The system is in standby mode the rest of the day, enabling a monitor to operate up to 10 years on a single battery.

Microcontrollers are particularly well-suited for portable and wearable applications because they combine high enough programmability and performance at low enough power consumption and cost to make microcontroller-based products accessible to large numbers of patients.

Engineers continue to refine microcontroller operations, though, focusing in particular on ultra-fast – and thus energy-saving – transitions between active mode and sleep mode. Those now take just a few millionths of a second, producing high-performance activity when it’s needed.