A wearable health monitoring device prototype

Nearly 3 million infants die in their first month of life every year, and 98% of these deaths occur in the developing world. In August 2016, Neopenda, a healthtech startup, contacted Ciklum with an idea to produce an innovative healthcare solution to support newborns in low-resource environments around the world. The idea was to develop a simple, low-power wearable device that measures, tracks, and displays four important vital signs for critically-ill newborn babies: heart rate, respiratory rate, blood oxygen saturation, temperature.

Ciklum R&D Engineering team offered pioneering biomedical IoT development and digital signal processing expertise.

Ciklum R&D Engineering team developed a simple, and low-power wearable device that tracks, and displays 4 vital signs for newborns in distress. The team encountered two main challenges:

• 3 months for the development of a fully functioning PoC from scratch
• Combining R&D of algorithms, with traditional software and firmware development for embedded systems.

Short development iterations allowed Neopenda to give immediate feedback and to invest in the most relevant product features:

• Architecture design
• Hardware design
• Firmware
• Signal processing
• Cloud service
• Web application
• QA/Testing

The initial project duration was 1,500 hours across 3 months. Neopenda obtained a prototype ready for clinical trials, further improvement, and development with a 90% cost-reduction compared to other market analogs.

Since the production of the version 1 prototype, Neopenda and Ciklum have worked on testing and refining the system. Neopenda has passed requisite safety testing for clinical trial use, and is beginning the process of preparing for CE Marking. Ciklum R&D team follows these regulations to ensure the device prototype will be completely safe for newborns: it already uses a Bluetooth Low Energy transmitter that is FCC-approved and complies with all safety recommendations.