The short-range wireless Bluetooth communication technology and products have been designated by the world-renowned home medical equipment and rehabilitation product companies. The Bluetooth chip supports the application of most wireless medical and health products, and the applicable fields include: oximeter, blood pressure meter, thermometer, weight scale, blood glucose meter, cardiovascular activity monitor, portable electrocardiograph, etc.
Interconnection of medical and health equipment and Continua organization
At present, most of the data formats and communication protocols of medical and health devices are proprietary standards of various companies. This will bring inconvenience to end users, bring huge difficulties to the construction of medical and health equipment application software systems, and it is also not conducive to doctors to share electronic data and save resources.
In order to better solve the compatibility problem and promote the faster development and wider application of the medical and health device industry, there are already more than 230 medical and health device manufacturers and related technology companies in the world. An international organization, Continua, has been established to develop International standards for communication between medical and health devices.
The data format selected by the Continua organization is IEEE11073; and the HDP protocol in Bluetooth technology is selected as the standard for wireless data transmission. At present, in developed markets such as Japan, such products that meet the specifications have been sold. In the future, medical equipment and health equipment products with communication functions must comply with the IEEE11073 data format and must have Bluetooth HDP functions, which has become an inevitable trend. This trend provides new opportunities for manufacturers to upgrade their products and make breakthroughs in the original market structure.
Bluetooth HDP protocol and low energy Bluetooth chip
Bluetooth HDP protocol
The Bluetooth HDP protocol is specifically defined for the wireless transmission of medical data. Compared with the general Bluetooth cable instead of the SPP protocol, the Bluetooth HDP protocol has the following advantages:
*Apply the new eL2CAP to make data transmission safer and more reliable.
* Increase the flow control mechanism of channel-related retransmission to improve QoS.
*Allow parallel multiplexing of channels, for example, a medical device can communicate with multiple remote sensors at the same time.
* Time synchronization function. It can provide a time reference with an accuracy of 2ms to synchronize different nodes in the Bluetooth transmission network. This enables all sensors to be synchronized to a common time reference, and the physiological parameters provided are stamped with the corresponding time point.
Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology is part of the Bluetooth V4.0 core specification, which can meet the requirements of low-power wireless connections for small battery-powered devices and greatly extend battery life. Low-power Bluetooth chips are mainly used in medical and health sensor networks where power supply is limited.