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Handheld Medical Device

LabVIEW Development Testbed for Handheld Medical Device

Posted in Embedded Development & Programming, LabVIEW, Medical and Pharmaceutical, Product Development, Test & Measurement Automation

Summary

DMC worked with a client to develop and optimize a hand held medical device for the consumer market.  DMC developed and implemented flexible software for an integrated test fixture to perform critical control, data acquisition, and data mining.  This was used to verify and optimize product design parameters over several component and prototype iterations.

Solution

The client started with a loose set of requirements for their hand-held medical device.  DMC helped the client determine the potential scope of the system and determine testing and optimization needs.  The end result is a pre-production test system that was modular, configurable, and flexible enough to handle testing and optimization of new features and modes that were unforseen during initial development.

Following is a summary of the solution's architecture and features:

  • LabVIEW-based control and data acquisition software application
    • Critically timed data collection from a variety of asynchronous sources
    • Modular structure; Engineers and Technicians can replace physical components without code changes
    • Custom UART communication protocol developed
    • Custom driver software for controlling and communicating to external monitoring devices
  • Custom LabVIEW and TDMS system developed to collect and tag large amounts of data.  Hundreds of tests were run per day to scope and verify critical parameters.
  • Using DIAdem and National Instrument Datafinder to intelligently sort and analyze test data, allowing effective development team response and decision-making.

Customer Benefits

  • Fast testing and verification of new features
  • Capability to rapidly create meaningful data, and have that data immediately accesible and appropriately tagged for validation.
  • Automated testing for optimization of product performance, ultimately enabling the product development team to make effective design decisions.
  • Faster time to market
  • More reliable test data with precisely timed synchronous control and data acquisition
  • Flexible test platform and data mining tools for future qualification and design iteration

Technologies

  • National Instruments LabVIEW
  • National Instruments DIAdem
  • Stepper Motor Motion Control
  • Custom UART Communications Protocol