Medical USB Platform

Texas Instruments offers a Continua-certified USB hardware-software platform that implements the Personal Healthcare Device Class (PHDC) along with
IEEE 11073.

As personal healthcare devices become more ubiquitous, companies are developing products with connectivity that allow data to be exchanged easily. PHDC (Personal Healthcare Device Class), which is part of the USB standard, is designed for portable medical and wellness devices to be able to send measurements to USB hosts such as personal computers, cell phones, etc. The Continua Health Alliance has released guidelines for interoperability between various types of devices implementing the USB standard. Texas Instruments offers a USB platform for agent devices that has been certified by the Continua Health Alliance after having passed a rigorous testing procedure. Customers can use the software stacks of this platform to reduce development time for devices that will comply with the medical industry standards such as the Continua Health Alliance.

These stacks are available for use on TI's industry-leading, ultra-low-power MSP430™ MCUs.

TI chose to partner with S3 (Silicon & Software Systems Ltd.) because of their extensive experience with the Continua Health Alliance and with developing code-efficient stacks for low-power MCU's such as the MSP430.

Features

• USB-IF certified
• Stacks are part of a Continua-certified hardware + software platform
• Documentation to enable customers to quickly integrate stacks within their own medical solutions
• Code efficiency: small flash memory footprint
• Code examples available for several medical devices
• Capable of running on TI's MSP430 MCUs

Benefits

• Reduced development time for personal medical devices
• Allows customers to use their expertise in implementing their applications rather than developing code for lower-layer APIs and stacks
• Confidence that TI's platform is already Continua-certified

Getting Started with MSP430 Medical USB

• Click here for more information on getting started with USB on MSP430. Most of the listed MSP430 devices with integrated USB should be usable with this platform. In order to ensure that you have enough memory to work with during development, we recommend that you stay away from smaller memory devices such as the F550x family.
• Depending on your needs, the MSP430F5529 may be a good starting point.
  In that case, you will need:
  • MSP-FET430U80USB (Target Board & FET Programmer) or MSP-TS430PN80USB (Target Board only) available at MSP430 Hardware page
  • Samples of MSP430F5529 in 80-QFP package
  • Go to this page to download the User's Guide and software for this medical USB platform. The software is available with no royalties or sublicense fees provided that the code is used on TI MSP430 microcontrollers.
  • Integrated Development Environments (IDEs):
    • IAR (Free version available)
    • Code Composer Studio (CCS)
      • Core Edition is free
      • Full Edition is $445