The Hindu Business Line : To your health

Chips designed by researchers at TI India touch our lives in more ways than one, says the company. Besides spheres such as telecommunications, electronic gadgets and devices, these chips drive healthcare processes and simplify patient care directly or remotely, through telemedicine, it says.

The Director of Business Development, Medical, Texas Instruments India, Poornima Mohanachandran, spoke to eWorld on this exciting area and how new chips will make small remote healthcare equipment such as ECG machines and electronic stethoscope cheaper and other devices more efficient. Excerpts from the chat:

What is TI working on in the healthcare space?

Semiconductors can play a role in revolutionising the medical electronics market. They have changed the paradigm in the area of communications with the single-chip cell phone impacting the lives of millions of people.

In contrast, we have a long runway ahead for semiconductors to impact the field of medical electronics.

Texas Instruments chips can help medical equipment manufacturers make a number of portable electronic devices such as digital thermometers, blood glucose monitors, blood pressure monitors, insulin pumps, heart rate monitors, digital hearing aids, etc, in addition to hospital equipment such as CT and MRI scanners, x-ray machines and ultrasound scanners.

Earlier this year, we announced new ultrasound systems, with superior image quality and reduced power consumption. We also recently announced products that improve accuracy and extend the battery life for a host of medical devices including electro-physiological electrodes such as ECG, EEG and EMG.

Our latest microcontrollers help design products with longer lasting batteries or no batteries, particularly relevant to medical electronics devices such as implantables.

Increasingly, hand-held devices or RFID-based technologies are being used to monitor patients. How does TI see this market?

Technology is becoming a critical factor in monitoring patients with speed and accuracy.

For medical electronics equipment makers, timing and accurate information are important factors. In medical imaging applications such as x-ray, ultrasound and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) devices, the more doctors can see while examining a patient, the better equipped they are to help the patient.

Therefore, high-resolution images followed by intelligent analysis has driven medical equipment developers to require better video and imaging technologies, faster processing and high-speed communication capabilities.

High-speed processing will reduce the amount of time a patient is exposed to x-ray, the amount of time required to be spent with an MRI machine, etc. At the same time, lower power consumption will enable the proliferation of portable equipment. In many embedded medical applications, size is also a consideration.

Unlike the general semiconductor industry, the healthcare sector is recession-proof. How big is this market whereTI operates?

As per the India Semiconductor Association-Frost & Sullivan report, the medical semiconductor market in India is growing at a CAGR of 20 per cent.

A Springboard Research report states that India has the fastest growing healthcare market in Asia with an expected growth rate of 22 per cent, followed closely by China and Vietnam. A recent FICCI-Ernst & Young study has predicted a 15-20 per cent growth for the Indian medical equipment market and has estimated the market size to be about $5 billion by 2012.

According to a report by McKinsey, one-fifth of India’s population is likely to have medical insurance by 2015, leading to an estimated increase in consumer spending on healthcare.

Another factor is the country’s growing middle class that can afford quality healthcare. Increase in education levels and awareness of the importance of hygiene and healthcare are also playing a role.

There is no one fit for all, more so in the healthcare industry. How do you address the customisation challenge?

Some of the areas being addressed by technology are preventive healthcare, technology solutions for disability and high quality healthcare for diseases. Therefore, we do foresee many customisation challenges.

To address these, TI is working on programmable devices that will help customisation at a fast pace. TI is enabling ecosystem partners to provide modular designs.

For example, wireless connectivity modules will enable easy conversion of wired interfaces to wireless. TI is partnering with healthcare service providers and medical devices manufacturers to innovate with products that impact future trends.

There is this trend of a single processor replacing several processors in a system. It has happened in mobile phones, is it the case in healthcare applications too?

The conflicting demands of increased performance, functionality and energy efficiency are the big challenges facing the medical electronics industry today. Another is the need to take healthcare to remote areas through telemedicine and through portable devices that are light, small in size and capable of delivering high performance.

A single processor that can perform multiple applications can effectively meet this challenge, just as the single chip cell-phone revolutionised the mobile communications sector not too long ago.

Aging populations, rising healthcare costs and increased demand in emerging economies have created a growing need for portable and affordable ultrasound equipment to be used in doctors’ clinics, ambulances and remote regions.

Any new breakthroughs from TI?

Moving from low power to ‘no power’ (including novel methods of energy harvesting) and miniaturised packaging technologies are the two biggest innovations for the chip industry in medical electronics.

In June 2008, TI announced a breakthrough ultra-low power microcontroller, offering the industry’s lowest power consumption for devices, increased Flash and RAM memory and integrated peripherals such as radio frequency (RF), USB, encryption and LCD interfaces.

The “low power to no power” capability plays a vital role in medical implantables where it becomes imperative for the battery to get recharged periodically through certain biological changes inside the body and possess the ability to stay inside for many years without causing any damage or infection internally.

TI’s focus is on application-specific products for signal chain products, wireless connectivity and implantable devices.

TI committed $15 million globally to medical electronics research last year. We are helping to drive standards through close involvement with the respective standards’ bodies.

How many patents has TI filed from India?

Engineers at the Texas Instruments R&D Centre in Bangalore have filed over 530 patents in the US. This is the highest number of patents filed by any technology company in India — local and multinational. This comprises various industry verticals, including medical electronics.

In April this year, we signed a collaborative agreement with the School of Medical Science and Technology (SMST), Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur, to develop semiconductor technologies that will help improve the quality, comfort and accessibility of healthcare.

Patient monitoring and telemedicine will enable healthcare services to be cost-effectively administered to remote populations and will even allow medical services to be more pervasive in urban settings.

Increasingly, we see devices becoming portable, wearable or implantable with these markets being important growth areas. Implantable devices will help address various types of disability.

vrishi@thehindu.co.in

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