Medical and Healthcare Product Design

Telemedicine System Design, Medical Device Design, and Biotechnology Equipment Design

Plextek offers a high quality, rapid and reliable healthcare design service to support companies with the development of electronic products for medical devices, diagnostics devices, telemedicine systems and biotechnology equipment. Our experience in medical device design and our knowledge of regulatory affairs means that all work is carried out to the highest quality and in full accordance with appropriate international standards. Plextek can offer you:

• Immediate access to a large pool of specialist knowledge and medical electronics design experience
• Complete end-to-end range of development services for medical devices: industrial design, embedded software, analogue and digital hardware design
• Design for manufacture: whether your product is a high volume medical device, low cost item, or high value engineering
• Rapid prototyping: turning your ideas into products in the optimum timescale
• Regulatory assistance for FDA approvals and CE marking
  

With our strong background in Radio Communications Systems, Product Design and Manufacturing Engineering, Plextek is the obvious choice for our medical clients wishing to develop diagnostics devices and ambulatory telemedicine systems right through to final placement in manufacture.

Plextek's capabilities also include high speed optoelectronics for scanning of micro-arrays and bioinformatics search engine accelerators for gene matching.

Plextek holds BS EN ISO9001:2000 certification with procedures incorporated specifically to cover the development of medical products. For more information about Plextek's quality system for medical and healthcare devices click here.

Plextek has been involved in a wide breadth of projects with medical applications, from primary care ultrasound equipment through to over-the-counter disposable diagnostic devices. Examples include:

• Medical telemetry system design for remote monitoring of patient diagnostic data
• Primary care X-ray imaging equipment
• In-vitro male fertility tester electronics development
• Miniaturisation of wireless transceivers

Additional details of our medical device design experience are given below. If you would like to discuss how you could make use of Plextek’s electronics development services, please contact us

Medical and Healthcare Product Development Services Adobe PDF 170KB

Telemedicine System Design

Wireless technology offers not only the opportunity to alleviate bedside cabling, but offers further opportunities such as continuous monitoring, drug delivery feedback and A&E advance status notification.

Plextek has extensive experience of designing and placing into manufacture wireless systems, both within, and outside the Healthcare arena. No single wireless solution is ideal for all telemedicine applications and Plextek’s experience of a diverse spectrum of technologies allows the optimum technology to be used for the medical device design that is in progress.

Telemedicine and Telecare Adobe PDF 171KB

Telecare Case Study

Increased life expectancy and rising healthcare costs make it a priority to ensure that the elderly are able to remain independently living in their own homes for as long as possible. Plextek were involved as a consultative role in the Brunel University Millennium Homes project where wireless technology was used to transfer data from a sensor network to a central core processor which monitored the well-being of a resident in their own home.

Millennium Homes Adobe PDF 128KB

Low Power Ultra-narrow Band Telemetry

Battery life is often a major concern with wireless telemedicine device designs and Plextek is able to apply technology developed from other applications into medical device designs. Plextek has developed a bespoke Ultra-narrow Band Telemetry system specifically to deliver small packets of data in a very power efficient manner. This technology has been used in the past for equipment providing repeated status measuements from a single D-cell battery over a period of 10 years. For further information, please see the brochure link below.

Ultra-Narrow Band (UNB) Telemetry Adobe PDF 313KB

If you would like to discuss these or any other medical applications, please contact us.

Medical Device Design

Medical Imaging

One crucial advance in modern day medicine is the vastly improved diagnostics available through the use of modern imaging systems. These allow the clinician to look into the body of a patient, with unprecedented precision, through modern sensor technology combined with imaging technology. Plextek has, over many years, aquired experience in X-ray and ultrasound imaging, including the development of a new innovative ultrasound sensor design and the utilisation of an X-ray CCD sensor for a new type of dental imager.

General practitioners and dentists now routinely use computers in their surgeries for both diagnostic and administrative purposes. With today's technology it is now possible to build sophisticated imaging systems in a compact format. These can interface directly to existing surgery computers at a fraction of the cost of similar previous systems.

Plextek has recently completed a project to design an x-ray image processor with a USB interface for a major international medical supplier. The processor was required to connect their dental X-ray CCDs to both Apple Macintosh and PC Compatible computers. The system has significant benefits to both patient and practitioner in ease of use and reduction in X-ray dose. More information is available on this project by downloading the case study below:

Dental CCD Imaging for E2V Adobe PDF 142kb

Plextek has collaborated with an established manufacturer of ultrasound sensors to develop technology to be used in medical imaging products for measuring the different densities of bone and other materials. The technology is based around an ultrasonic sensor array and is primarily aimed at the early detection of osteoporosis. Further information is available by downloading the case study below:

Ultrasonic Imaging Adobe PDF 215KB

Over-the-counter In-Vitro Diagnostics Kits

Over-the-counter home diagnosis kits are now commonplace since the introduction of the home pregnancy testing kit in the 1980s. Testers have become increasingly more diverse since then, but have tended to remain as simple biochemical processes. By introducing miniature cost-effective electronics into a tester, it is possible to control more complex biochemical processes and simplify the patient prompting system whilst ensuring that the unit cost still remains viable for a disposable test.

Plextek has recently developed the electronics control module for the Genosis Fertell Male Fertility Tester. Paul Bateman, CEO at Genosis said "Plextek's electronics design expertise has enabled us to provide a reliable and robust solution at a cost acceptable for an over-the-counter disposable device”. For more details on this project please download the case study below:

Genosis Controller for Home Male Fertility Test Adobe PDF 427KB

The Genosis Fertell is currently undergoing trials, up to date information on this product can be found at the Genosis website.

Biotechnology Equipment Design

Biotechnology is an enabler for the heathcare and related sectors. The convergence of Biotechnology knowledge with Electronics and Software knowledge is fuelling very rapid progress in this area.

Plextek have interacted with a number of companies in this field, which may be grouped into two broad areas:

• Measurement , especially where optical processes are involved, for example time resolved flourescence and the need for single photon counting. Earlier Plextek work on guided optics and detector systems is leveraged for new and direct application in this field. Solutions apply equally well to laboratory equipment or small point-of-care IVD testers.
• Intensive Computing , where dedicated hardware solutions can be shown to be faster than even large networked farms of off-the-shelf computers. Such dedicated signal processing can be performed in reconfigurable hardware, drawing on Plextek's long experience in this area. An example application from bioinformatics would be resequencing or gene searching for SNP mapping.

Gene Expression Microarrays and Biochips: Electronic Measurement Solutions for High Throughput

If you would like to discuss these or any other medical applications, please contact us.

Affiliations:

Plextek is an active member of Medilink East; a non-profit making organisation which brings together on a regular basis, medical manufacturing and distribution companies, hospitals and universities to stimulate innovation and drive forward profitable developments in the medical technology and systems sector.
Plextek is a member of BIVDA (The British In Vitro Diagnostics Association) which is the national trade association for companies with major involvement and interest in the In Vitro Diagnostics (IVD) industry. BIVDA represents both manufacturers and distributors who are active in the UK.

If you would like to discuss how you could make use of Plextek’s medical electronics design services, please contact us