As wearable devices are more closely integrated into people's lives, the ecosystem of the healthcare industry is also gradually changing, and the monitoring of human vital signs is gradually being transferred from medical institutions to individual homes.
With the development of medical care and the gradual upgrading of personal cognition, medical health is becoming more and more personalized to meet individual needs. At present, AI technology can be used to give diagnostic suggestions.
The COVID-19 pandemic has been a catalyst for accelerated personalization in the healthcare industry, especially for telemedicine, medtech and mHealth. Consumer wearable devices include more health monitoring functions. One of the functions is to monitor the user's health status so that they can continuously pay attention to their own parameters such as blood oxygen and heart rate.
Continuous monitoring of specific physiological parameters by wearable fitness devices becomes even more important if the user has reached the point where treatment is necessary.
Stylish appearance design, accurate data collection and long battery life have always been the basic requirements for consumer health wearable products in the market. At present, in addition to the above features, demands such as ease of wear, comfort, waterproof, and lightness have also become the focus of market competition.
Often, patients follow the doctor's prescriptions for medication and exercise during and immediately after treatment, but after a while they become complacent and no longer follow the doctor's orders. And this is where wearable devices play an important role. Patients can wear wearable health devices to monitor their vital sign data and get real-time reminders.
The current wearable devices have added more intelligent modules based on the inherent functions of the past, such as AI processors, sensors, and GPS/audio modules. Their cooperative work can improve measurement accuracy, real-time and interactivity, so as to maximize the role of sensors.
As more functions are added, wearable devices will face the challenge of space constraints. First of all, the traditional components that make up the system have not been reduced, such as power management, fuel gauge, microcontroller, memory, temperature sensor, display, etc.; secondly, since artificial intelligence has become one of the growing demands of smart devices, it is necessary to add AI microprocessors to facilitate data analysis and provide more intelligent input and output, such as supporting voice control through audio input;
Again, a greater number of sensors need to be mounted to better monitor vital signs, such as biological health sensors, PPG, ECG, heart rate sensors; finally, the device needs to use a GPS module, accelerometer or gyroscope to determine the user's movement status and location.
In order to facilitate data analysis, not only microcontrollers need to transmit and display data, but also data communication between different devices is required, and some devices even need to send data directly to the cloud. The above functions enhance the intelligence of the device, but also make the already limited space more tense.
Users welcome more features, but they don't want to increase the size because of these features, but they want to add these features in the same or smaller size. Therefore, miniaturization is also a huge challenge faced by system designers.
The increase of functional modules means a more complex power supply design, because different modules have specific requirements for the power supply.
A typical wearable system is like a complex of functions: in addition to AI processors, sensors, GPS, and audio modules, more and more functions such as vibration, buzzer, or Bluetooth may also be integrated. It is estimated that the size of the solution to implement these functions will reach about 43mm2, requiring a total of 20 devices.
Post time: Jul-24-2023