LM Technologies - Medical Solutions

Health care is a vitally important aspect of everyone’s life. It is a constantly evolving industry with huge pressures driving its development. The gathering and communication of information is a key player in the advancement of medical science and technology. Sending this information wirelessly allows for greater freedom of movement, reduces clutter and removes surfaces capable of transporting bacteria and viruses.

Wearables

With the explosion of mobile computing, first precipitated by smart phones, health care monitoring and medical diagnosis is now open to all. Information about a persons health can be collected by affordable wearables and then transmitted to the cloud where big data algorithms utilise it for scientific research and-or the wearers personal benefit.

For most wearables the limiting factor of any design is space. Which is why LM provides the Bluetooth® low energy LM936 System In Package powered by an ARM Cotrex-M3:

The LM936 is a compact, highly integrated Bluetooth® low energy system-in-package (SiP) module. The LM936 SiP includes an embedded low energy antenna, 24 MHz clock, and 512 Kb EEPROM, so only a minimal set of external components is needed to create a standalone low energy device.

Bluetooth Serial Port Profile

LM’s Bluetooth® to Serial adapters have been used within health care to enable wireless RS232 and RS485 cable-replacement solutions for almost a decade now. The resilient frequency-hopping nature of Bluetooth® and the pass-through and fully direction independent aspects of our LM048 and LM058 Bluetooth® serial adapters have allowed customers to utilise them to carry both legacy and modern serial protocols.

The LM4xx series of serial modules have also been used to extend the connectivity of existing products where a more integrated solution was required. For many of these projects LM has provided firmware modifications to facilitate the particular requirements  of an existing system.

 

TECHNOLOGY VS FEATURE BLUETOOTH CLASSIC (2.X) BLUETOOTH SMART (4.X) THREAD SIGFOX WIFI
Sub-GHz N N N Y N
2.4GHz Y Y Y N Y
Frequency Hopping Y Y N Y N
Power Consumption Medium Low Low Ultra-Low High
Mesh N Y (Limited) Y N Y (Limited)
Broadcast N N N Y N
Cost Medium Low Low Low High
Bandwidth Medium Low Low Ultra-Low High
Deployment Required Y Y Y N Y
Security Y* Y Y Y** Y
Typical Use Case Transparent Pass-through of Serial data Official or Custom Profile Official, Custom or Zigbee Application Profile Custom packet structure Custom packet structure