CenTrak Uses Ultra-Low Power MSP430 MCUs from Texas Instruments to Streamline Patient and Equipment Tracking in Medical Facilities
Combining ultra-low-power control with innovative remote communications, CenTrak, (formally Remote Play) has announced the introduction of its InTouchT Real Time Location System (RTLS), an advanced, easily installed system for tracking medical personnel, patients and equipment that is based on MSP430 microcontroller units (MCUs) from Texas Instruments.
The new InTouch RTLS employs DualTrakT Technology, a unique combination of radio and infrared (IR) communications enabling the accurate location of people and equipment to room and sub-room levels, saving time and costs for hospitals and other medical facilities while helping to improve patient care. Thanks to the extremely low power consumption of TI's MSP430 MCUs, InTouch units operate on batteries that last for several years, making the system easy to deploy and rescale, as well as inexpensive to maintain.
"CenTrak is at the forefront of innovative efforts to develop technology that improves medical efficiencies while creating a better environment and experience for patients," said Cornelia Huellstrunk, product marketing manager, MSP430 of TI. "By leveraging TI's MSP430 performance and power savings offerings, InTouch helps lower RTLS expenses while providing highly accurate tracking, saving costs for facilities and helping to promote medical care."
Accuracy and Ease of Use
InTouch networks consist of small tags placed on personnel, patients or equipment, room monitors that are scaled like smoke detectors, and access points that are centrally located on a floor and communicate to a computer network. The tags, which can be easily worn or attached, come with buttons and LEDs that can be customized for different functions, such as indicating that a patient is ready for a procedure. Non-line-of-sight Gen2IRT infrared provides unambiguous room-level positioning, and two-way radio frequency (RF) communications enables all units to share location data and system maintenance information as needed.
The unique signaling combination provides faster, more accurate location of tags. Equally important is the InTouch installation process, which allows for quick system piloting and ease of deployment in any hospital.
Aside from the Ethernet-connected central access points, InTouch units operate from batteries that last, under normal operating conditions, 18 months or longer in tags and four to five years in monitors. Since the units can be installed quickly, the deployment process that traditionally required four months of site surveys, preparation and installation, has now been reduced by CenTrak to two weeks.
"The tremendous opportunity for InTouch RTLS lies in the solution it offers our customers-simple installation and increased accuracy," said Dr. Ari Naim, CEO of Centrak. "InTouch's DualTrak breakthrough technology not only creates a widely affordable infrastructure, but more importantly provides the room-level and sub-room-level accuracy that enables valuable and exciting applications. Because InTouch is scalable to millions of square feet and is able to track tens of thousands of tags, we expect to encounter a wave of small and large companies building upon our infrastructure to create new solutions that address work flow efficiency."
An Integrated, Low-Power MCU Solution
All of CenTrak's InTouch units are based on TI's MSP430F20xx MCUs, which extend battery life by approximately 25 percent while providing up to 16 MIPS (million instructions per second) for communication, identification and system control. An ultra-low power mode minimizes power consumption during standby cycles, and a fast wake-up ensures rapid response for active use. Integrated peripherals, including analog-to-digital converters (ADCs), timers and comparators, reduce system cost and assist in keeping tag and monitor circuits as small as their coin-sized batteries. The MCU's on-chip flash memory helps simplify development and enables reprogramming - an essential feature with InTouch's addressing requirements - while TI's comprehensive tools and support have helped CenTrak develop its products easily and bring them to market quickly.
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