Wound therapy device
Portable Negative Pressure Wound Therapy device
Starting situation
A modular microcontroller platform is to be developed for a new device family in the field of wound therapy. Another challenge involved the ability to add flexible function modules for future applications that were not yet clearly defined.
The client already had a few ideas and wanted to test their suitability with IMT as the sparring partner. It remains unclear whether a platform with an operating system is required for future tasks and connectivity, or whether a small microcontroller with a few resources would be sufficient.
Project objectives
The main objective is to define the appropriate microcontroller architecture for a touch GUI and to formulate a therapy controller and software concept. The latter involves an operating system, including a scheduler, development tools, programming language, and software libraries.
Technical implementation
The engineers at IMT worked with the client to develop a suitable system and convinced them of the advantages of the Dataflow Runtime software framework developed by IMT. This solution offers a long battery life because no high-performance microcontroller is required for the operating system. In addition, the system switches the processor to sleep mode when it is not in use. Comprehensive, wireless communications for data exchange, software updates, and service are executed by a dedicated communication controller. This solution reliably decouples the safety-critical therapeutic process, which thus cannot be influenced from outside.
Results
The client decided to implement the proposed concept. The next step involved the development of the software architecture by IMT for future expansion phases. Later IMT worked on the implementation of the hardware drivers for the future platform.
