Customer:
Our customer – a Europe based renowned and world’s largest manufacturer of medical equipment – was working on a flagship product development project.
Their vision was to develop a connected & portable ECG solution for early diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases. The device is designed to offer simplified workflow to both patients and healthcare professionals or doctors.
Business Challenge:
Customer’s in-house R&D engineering team kick-started product development of portable ECG device with an ARM based embedded controller.
However, the in-house product engineering realized the need for additional embedded software and hardware developers for the project. Hence customer was on a lookout for an experienced IoT and embedded product development partner in Bangalore.
After diligent software and hardware vendor evaluation,customer partnered with our team in Bangalore. Following are some of the technology challenges that were discussed during our requirement gathering workshops:
- Design and development of a device HMI to display patient’s ECG data in real time and enable end-users to record ECG of the patient remotely from host application and/or locally.
- HMI allows easy interface to end user (technical assistant) to quickly browse through patient data and prepare the device to record ECG for a particular patient.
- HMI was also required to support wireless up gradation of the ECG software and firmware (FOTA).
(Using PC/mobile application over WiFi). - During the technical discussion, customer shared the challenges they faced in automation of the software code testing and production environment programming.
- Our customer required expertise in firmware development of the power management modules of the ECG device. The designed firmware modules were required to comply with strict safety tests mandatory for medical devices.
Embitel solution:
- Our team implemented FOTA (Firmware update Over The Air). To ensure safety and security, adequate measures were taken in the bootloader level. Also strict authentication mechanisms were established to ensure validity of the application as well measure to revert back the update in case of any issues found during the process.
- Devise settings are stored locally and were synchronized with the remote server to ensure proper synchronization.
- Automated software testing solutions: Our embedded software developers designed an unit test code for automation of the software code testing with the help of CppUTest unit test framework.
- Design and development of end-to-end HMI for portable ECG device.
- The designed HMI framework is used to simulate the interface on any Windows based desktop.
- Our team implemented a firmware for a robust fail safe power management module to overcome the power related hardware limitations.
- Automation of production server programming: We developed a command line software tool for automation of the production software programming.
Embitel impact:
- Helped our customers in implementation of several key components of firmware, bootloader and UI.
- The Firmware over the Air (FOTA) updates mechanism designed by our team is very robust, secure and reliable. This ensured that the end-users of our customer’s ECG device will have a seamless consistent experience with secure and updated application.
- Developed custom solutions wherever standard frameworks or off the shelf components are not available.
- The unit test and production programming automation solutions has helped our customer achieve time and cost savings on testing and programming.
Tools and Technologies used:
- Segger’s graphical library – EmWin.
- Controller: 32 Bit ARM Controller from ST Micro.
- IDE : IAR Workbench.
- Language: Embedded C.
