First wrist-worn wearables platform rolls for ECG, heart rate, and temperature monitoring

By Gina Roos, editor-in-chief

Targeting new capabilities in virtual health-care monitoring devices, Maxim Integrated Products, Inc. has unveiled its Health Sensor Platform 2.0 (HSP 2.0) for designers looking to create wearable solutions that enable the monitoring of various health parameters including electrocardiogram (ECG), heart rate, and temperature monitoring. The new platform overcomes challenges associated with precise ECG monitoring on the wrist and accurate body temperature monitoring, said Maxim.

The prototyping, evaluation, and development platform — MAXREFDES101# — enables designers to develop wrist-worn wearables with ECG, heart rate, and body temperature monitoring, a first in the industry, according to Maxim. The wrist-based device, housed in a watch casing, provides basic functionality out of the box.

“The data measurements collected by the HSP 2.0 can be owned by the wearer, alleviating data privacy concerns and allowing users to conduct their own data analysis,” said Maxim. Data is stored on the platform for patient evaluation or streamed to a PC for analysis.

One of the problems that Maxim Integrated is looking to address is the spiraling global health-care costs, said Andrew Burt, Maxim’s executive business manager for industrial health care. It’s 10% of the world’s GDP annual spend according to current estimates and a $9 trillion market, he added.

Burt said that the primary issue is how the consumer-related health and exercise monitoring devices will migrate into health care and add more functionality to make it more useful for people.

“People are now looking to collect data on themselves and understand that data a little more easily,” he said. It could be for early detection of some health-related issue whereby the data collected could help facilitate a conversation with your doctor or be used for continuous patient monitoring for people living with a chronic disease like diabetes.

The HSP 2.0 is an open platform, so designers can evaluate their own algorithms on the board. Maxim also future-proofed the platform with a modular format to accommodate new sensors as they become available.

Burt said that Maxim is focusing on four key technology areas: biopotential chipsets that measure very small voltages and current around the heart; contact temperature sensors that have clinical-grade accuracy of 0.1°C over the human body temperature range; power management devices (PMICs) with clever power management architectures for applications that need continuous monitoring; and optical sensors.

HSP 2.0 includes the following components:

• MAX32630 DARWIN low-power microcontroller for wearables and internet of things (IoT) applications
• MAX32664 ultra-low-power biometric sensor hub with embedded heart-rate algorithm
• MAX20303 highly integrated and programmable power management solution designed for ultra-low-power wearable applications
• MAX30205 human body temperature sensor with ±0.1°C accuracy
• MAX30001 ultra-low-power, single-channel integrated biopotential and bioimpedance analog front-end (AFE) solution for wearable applications
• MAX86141 ultra-low-power optical pulse oximeter and heart-rate sensor for wearables

The platform is the only available solution to integrate clinical-grade ECG along with heart-rate and body-temperature measurements in a wrist-worn format, said Maxim. The platform supports the Arm Mbed environment, enabling rapid application prototyping and access to an extensive library of open-source software.

“Customers in health care need good reference designs from us as a chipset company because they want to gather data and own that data,” said Burt. “Two years ago, Maxim released its health sensor platform, which contained a bunch of sensors, an MPU, and some algorithms and put the design files on the web. It turned out to be one of the most popular Maxim reference designs. We’re still shipping them now.”

Earlier this year, Maxim released the MAX-HEALTH-BAND evaluation and development platform, a wrist-worn heart-rate and activity monitor, and the MAX-ECG-MONITOR evaluation and development platform (in a patch or chest strap), which monitors ECG and heart-rate signals.

Now with the release of the HSP 2.0, it’s a wrist-worn design so you measure heart-related signals and do calorie counting and ECG monitoring on the wrist, said Burt.

What’s also new about this reference design is that Maxim has moved to a stackable PCB system, so as the company introduces new sensors, designers can just swap out the sensor board.

“We’ve found that we can spin out new sensors faster than we can spin out reference designs, so we created an architecture that is future-proof and scalable as we improve our sensors or make a different type of sensor,” said Burt.

The new reference design also allows for more customization. Customers still have access to all of the design files, but it now includes the layout of the watch casing, which is 3D-printed by Maxim.

Over-the-air upgrade functionality is in the plans for next year — likely in the spring, said Burt.

The Health Sensor Platform 2.0, MAXREFDES101#, is available with hardware and firmware files for $399 at Maxim’s website and select franchised distributors, including Avnet, Digi-Key, Mouser, and Newark element14. Arm Mbed also offers the hardware, firmware, and microboard.