TI technologies enable wide range of medical applications
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With 60 million people in the U.S. alone suffering
from chronic illness, the cost of Medicare doubling
to $26.8 billion this year and global health care spending
at $5 trillion annually, there are numerous opportunities
for growth and innovation in the medical semiconductor
industry, which was $2.65 billion last year.
Battery management, portability
TI's power-management and low-power technologies are crucial to a number of medical products, such as digital thermometers, insulin pumps, heart rate monitors and digital hearing aids that need longer battery life as well as portability. Many of these products include TI's microcontrollers, low-power RF technology and power-management chips.
For example, a portable glucometer, which measures
the amount of sugar in a person's blood, once needed two
double-A batteries
that lasted about three months. In less than 10 years,
TI has been able to optimize the system and decrease the
power
requirements to one single coin cell battery that powers
the device for life.
Over the years, TI has been able to drive down power using a combination of analog, digital and power-management technologies to the point where it's possible to make practical, useful systems at the milliwatt or lower range. At that range, it even becomes possible to harvest some energy out of the human body.
Wireless communication
TI is working with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to put a wireless interface on a microcontroller that would make the chip power low enough so that it could be implanted under the skin. The chip would communicate with a cell phone, or similar device through TI's low-power RF technology to give a continuous readout of a person's blood sugar, blood pressure or temperature.
"You can imagine that if we could make something low enough power to be very unobtrusively and maybe permanently embedded under your skin, you could enable a whole new set of applications, things that you wouldn't be able to do or wouldn't want to do today because the application was too bulky or was too power-hungry," said Martin Izzard, vice president and manager of TI's digital signal processing solution research and development.
"We're on the verge, a test-chip stage, of building things that
are extremely low power, low enough power to operate just by using your
body heat."
Small, unobtrusive
The goal, Martin said, is to get implantable devices small and unobtrusive enough that they are a fraction of the size of a fingernail and don't need to do anything other than absorb body heat to power themselves.
"I think it would enable a whole new field of medicine in which we had so much long-term information about somebody's vitals that we could predict far better or further in advance if people are running into some kind of health problem," Izzard said. |
