Changing "passive medicine" to "active health", sensors define the era of smart health

Abstract: Nowadays, under the situation of population aging and normalization of epidemic prevention and control, people have more expectations for life and health management, such as the care problem of "empty nest elderly", the data and scientific problem of health management, and so on. The advent of the digital wave provides an opportunity to solve these challenges. Among them, it is particularly important to use digital technology to promote the intelligence of health management and change "passive medical treatment" to "active health".

Nowadays, under the situation of population aging and normalization of epidemic prevention and control, people have more expectations for life and health management, such as the care problem of "empty nest elderly", the data and scientific problem of health management, and so on. The advent of the digital wave provides an opportunity to solve these challenges. Among them, it is particularly important to use digital technology to promote the intelligence of health management and change "passive medical treatment" to "active health".

In order to cope with the challenge of aging, the "14th Five-Year Plan for Healthy Aging" jointly issued by the National Health Commission and other 15 departments proposes to strengthen the concept of "the family is the first gate of health", develop smart health care services such as geriatric nerves, sleep, health testing and monitoring, and develop elderly health promotion assessment, diagnosis and monitoring technologies and products suitable for home and community application.

This has brought another "strong wind" to the market for home health monitoring related products. In the past two years, due to the aging trend and the impact of the epidemic factors, people's demand for medical health has been increasing day by day, which also makes the market prospects for home health monitoring related products optimistic. According to ABI market research, the number of installed home health monitoring products worldwide will reach 20 million units this year and grow to 180 million units in 10 years.

The huge market increase in health monitoring products also provides a rare market opportunity for semiconductor companies in the upstream of the industrial chain - whether it is professional medical equipment or wearable devices such as smart watches that measure heart rate, blood oxygen content and other indicators, or a variety of health monitoring systems in smart home scenarios, behind which are inseparable from a wide variety of high-precision sensors with different functions, they are like human "senses", assuming the responsibility of "eyes", "ears", "nose" and "skin" similar to wisdom , responsible for perceiving the current situation and changes in the human body or environment, and providing a data basis for the subsequent decision-making and execution of the entire health or environmental system.

As Li Guohao, Application Marketing Director of Infineon Technologies Greater China Power & Sensing Systems, said: "For medical and health care equipment, sensors are an important way to obtain human body information, and high-performance, low-power, small-size, low-priced products can make the equipment more practical." At the same time, the emergence of more innovative sensors can enable devices to achieve more functions, thereby accelerating the birth of smart health products. ”

Radar and ToF sensors "guard" the health of the elderly at home

In China, it is very common for children to work outside the home and live in different places with their parents, resulting in a large number of "empty nest" elderly people. The fourth sample survey of the living conditions of the elderly in urban and rural Areas in China shows that the number of "empty nest elderly" in the mainland has exceeded 100 million. If the elderly at home accidentally fall, suddenly bedridden but no one knows, it will bring great hidden dangers to the health and even life safety of the elderly. To this end, it is necessary to use scientific and technological means to "detect" the life and health status of the elderly at home in real time, so as to be able to rescue in time when an accident occurs.

At present, most of the elderly fall detection devices on the market still need the user's own button to trigger the alarm response, which is inconvenient in use. If the elderly lose consciousness after a fall, the functionality of these devices will become useless. In addition, the fall alarm function in the existing smart wearable devices also has shortcomings in terms of high false alarm trigger rate, which is in an embarrassing situation.

This challenge can now be well solved with Infineon's millimeter-wave radar solutions. Vital sign detection solutions based on Infineon's millimeter wave radar enable 24/7, contactless fall detection, provide timely alerts through communication interfaces, and achieve fall risk prediction to fully protect the home safety of the elderly. In addition, Infineon's millimeter-wave radar sensors and ToF technology can be used to determine whether the elderly have fallen, the former is very suitable for bedrooms, bathrooms and other places with smaller spaces and higher privacy requirements, and the latter is promising in a large area.

Zhang Tiehu, Senior Marketing Manager of The Power & Sensing Systems Division of Infineon Technologies Infineon Technologies in Greater China, said that with the help of ToF deep imaging technology and privacy protection, ToF has been applied to more medical and health fields. For example, it can realize the fall detection without leaking privacy, and has been successfully applied to the monitoring system of nursing homes and isolation hotels, providing a safe and reliable 24-hour "guardian" for the elderly in the living room.

It can be said that Infineon uses radar sensors and ToF to create a "safe house" for the elderly, in the daily life of many two generations of separation under the normal situation, radar and ToF sensors are the "clairvoyance" and "downwind ear" of the health status of the elderly at home, these sensors and the call for help and emergency medical rescue system combined to form a solution, can provide the elderly with more timely health protection, so that the elderly as far as possible to enjoy the old age.

In addition to fall monitoring, radar sensors can output more dimensional vital signs data. For example, Google installed Infineon's radar sensor in its smart speaker, which does not detect breathing and heart rate, but judges the length of sleep and the reaction during sleep by detecting the body movement of people during sleep, so as to judge whether deep sleep or light sleep, and at the same time, through the microphone can also detect whether to snore during sleep, providing scientific data basis for judging and then improving sleep quality.

Today, more and more partners are innovating their businesses with Sensors from Infineon, such as The Swiss digital health technology company Sleepiz. With Infineon's radar sensors, Sleepiz has launched a home sleep monitoring solution. The solution can be integrated into any networked smart home device such as smart speakers and bedside lamps to accurately monitor sleep quality in multiple dimensions. It is able to determine whether there is apnea during sleep by breathing rate, and the severity of the pause, and places this data in the cloud for easy viewing. Sleepiz has conducted numerous clinical studies with leading medical institutes and other sleep research institutes such as Charité and Ruhrlandklink in Berlin and Essen to demonstrate the accuracy of its solutions. It is worth mentioning that it is already providing medical sleep monitoring equipment using Infineon's radar technology to doctors in Switzerland and Germany.

CO sensors make indoor air pollution nowhere to be seen

In indoor environments, the most overlooked but health-related problem is indoor air pollution. According to a report released at the Second United Nations Environment Assembly in 2016, about 7 million people around the world die each year from air pollution, of which 4.3 million are related to indoor air pollution.

The continuous evolution of urbanization has led to an increased influx of modern buildings. In order to save energy, modern buildings have more and more efficient heat insulation and insulation performance, but poor ventilation can lead to poor indoor air quality, and the indoor concentration of some polluting substances may be 2 to 5 times higher than the outdoor concentration. Compared with outdoor air pollution, which is usually easy to observe or perceive, indoor air pollution is usually invisible, and if it is not accurately measured, it is impossible to talk about corresponding control, thus laying serious health risks.

In indoor air monitoring, carbon dioxide (CO) concentration is a key indicator of air quality. Since the body produces carbon dioxide with every exhalation, the concentration of carbon dioxide rises rapidly in crowded and poorly ventilated environments. When a person stays in a space of about 4 square meters, the carbon dioxide concentration value will rise from 500 PPM to more than 1000 PPM within 45 minutes, at which time the person will feel sleepy, difficult to concentrate, or lead to a decrease in work efficiency. If the concentration reaches more than 2000 PPM, people's cognitive ability will even be affected. It can be seen that high concentrations of CO can have serious adverse effects on human health

Especially in the context of the current epidemic, people's activities are mostly carried out indoors. There is a correlation between carbon dioxide concentration and aerosols, which are one of the transmission routes of the new crown virus. This means that effective monitoring of indoor carbon dioxide concentrations can play a positive role in the fight against the epidemic.

How to accurately perceive the concentration of CO in the room? Liu Ju, Marketing Manager of The Power & Sensing Systems Division of Infineon Technologies Greater China, said that there are many carbon dioxide detection technologies on the market, including NDIR, EC and eCO2, but if you want to meet the needs of popular civilians, there are still deficiencies in terms of cost, accuracy and size. That's why Infineon has developed carbon dioxide sensors based on photoacoustic spectroscopy (PAS) to address the pain points of today's ubiquitous applications.

The scheme uses a highly sensitive MEMS acoustic detector to detect the pressure change generated by carbon dioxide molecules in the sensor cavity, high sensitivity, reduce the complexity of the device and design, achieve small size and low cost, can be easily designed such as air conditioning, ventilation fan, etc. in various types of equipment, very suitable for a large number of industrial and commercial and consumer applications. For example, co-sensors are used to determine the air quality in a building space and control the air supply air intensity of the air conditioner accordingly, ensuring that the CO concentration is controlled within a comfortable and safe range.

The future is the era of smart medical health, and the premise is that everything can be perceived, measured, and digitized, which provides a broad market space for further innovation and development of sensors. As the world's leading semiconductor company, Infineon Technologies uses advanced sensor technology and continuously improved solutions to create super "senses" for various applications of smart health and even smart medical care, thus driving a new era of smart health and environmental monitoring with "cores". At the same time, Infineon Technologies is also actively cultivating the whole industry chain ecosystem in the field of smart health, working with different types of partners to open up more new application scenarios and jointly explore business opportunities.