Small is beautiful: Embedded device marks industry first
ADL Embedded Solutions, provider of high-performance embedded solutions, recently released what it says is the industry's smallest Intel-based embedded device. JC Ramirez, the company’s product manager, outlines how the device is suitable for a variety of medical device applications.
The newly released ADLEPC-1500 from ADL Embedded Solutions makes use of one of the industry’s smallest Intel-based Atom single board computers (SBC), resulting in a very small compact embedded PC at 1.3" x 3.4" x 3.2". While the Intel Atom cannot compare with ARM microprocessors with respect to low-power, it more than makes up for it with much higher compute and graphics performance with power starting at 3W for an Intel E3805 dual-core and extending to 10W for the Intel E3845 quad core processor.
The ADLEPC-1500 is a full-featured embedded PC providing USB2.0, USB3.0, DisplayPort, dual LAN ports and onboard M.2 SATA storage which is sufficient for most intelligent control applications for machinery, equipment, or IoT devices. A board-end connector provides added PCIe, SATA, GpIO, and USB outputs, allowing the ADLEPC-1500 to easily expand to larger I/O requirements for related products while standardizing on a common computing platform.
Suitable for medical devices
While the ADLEPC-1500 is small enough to fit the definition of wearable-computing in other industries, wearable medical devices remain the domain of ARM-based devices with much smaller size, weight and power, and performance. Instead, the ADLEPC-1500 is ideal for traditional laboratory diagnostic and analysis equipment which has traditionally been the domain of larger embedded PC systems but are increasingly being made smaller and more portable for ease of movement or in-room use. For ADL Embedded Solutions customers, these applications have included blood analysers, cardiac simulation tools and equipment, urology imaging systems, medical lasers, blood separation equipment, 3-D eye mapping, and ultrasound imaging.
The ADLEPC-1500 enables future cloud-computing and IoT applications by bringing intelligent control to the edge of the network fabric directly onto machinery and equipment. It is compatible with enterprise cloud computing platforms like Microsoft Azure under Linux and Windows operating systems. Healthcare IoT, sometimes termed IoHT (Internet of Healthcare Things) serves to monitor and track data being gathered at all levels of the healthcare systems including patients, medical equipment, logistics and distribution of pharmaceuticals, and much more. In these use scenarios, the ADLEPC-1500 can perform the function of a data aggregation hub with enough capacity and intelligence to monitor, store, analyse, and link to the cloud for enterprise applications.
What it means for medical device manufacture
A common requirement in the medical device space is the need for stability and future-proofing of their products. What this means for embedded hardware vendors such as ADL Embedded Solutions is that aside from meeting the technical requirements for an application, we also prioritise providing intangible benefits such as long product life availability (7 years plus), obsolescence management for end-of-life components, hardware revision control, firmware and BIOS revision control, customization services for both hardware and firmware, direct access to engineering and design teams, FAE support and readily available technical support.
This is especially critical for healthcare devices and equipment where the rate of product improvement and innovation is continuously being accelerated by the advent IoT needs and requirements.