Coming up on the Mbed OS Tech Forum: Mbed in Healthcare

Last updated 09 Mar 2021, by Donatien Garnier.

By Peter Ferguson, Director Healthcare Technologies at Arm

For healthcare companies to keep up with the pace of patient needs and deliver innovative products while outperforming the highest regulatory challenges, they need the product development process to be as quick and easy as possible. At the same time, medical devices are becoming more complex, with many now having integrated wireless connectivity, enabling onward delivery of the medical data as well as facilitating software and configuration updates that support products to be securely deployed for many years.

Previously, many digital devices were being built from the ground up, with highly customised bare metal firmware being written to target a specific product. This often added many layers of complexity and made it extremely hard to port the code to a new adaptation of the device for new regulations or trials. This added a significant amount of development time creating this custom code as well as tracking down bugs when they arose.

In contrast to the approach of developing a large amount of custom code for each new medical device, over the last few years, we’ve seen a number of healthcare companies starting their development with Mbed OS as a foundation. By using Mbed’s well-supported software stack, less time is spent programming. Plus, they’re building higher quality code with more product flexibility during early development, resulting in a shorter path to a medical-grade device.

In the last year, we have made a number of new and important changes to the OS to expand its capabilities. For example, the OS 6.1 release, focused on improving the experience with Platform Security Architecture (PSA) when used in conjunction with Mbed OS. Also, the OS 6.3 release added several more features, including a focus on connecting to any public cloud, including integrations for AWS SDK, Google Cloud IoT, and Microsoft Azure IoT. These changes are helping many healthcare companies build trusted and secure devices quickly and efficiently.

One of our development partners, eg technology, a product engineering design and development consultancy, who specialise in creating medical devices, have been trialling Mbed OS. Incorporating Mbed in to eg’s highly complex product development process has streamlined programmes and optimised the software process.

During tomorrow’s Mbed OS Tech Forum, hosts Alessandro and Don will be joined by Stephen Starkie, Head of Software from eg technology to talk about his experience using Mbed OS. He will share his experience as we ask him questions about how we can improve Mbed to help healthcare companies as well as MedTech design and development specialists, like eg.

Set a reminder for this week’s session here.

The Mbed OS Tech Forum takes place every second Wednesday of the month at 5pm GMT/9am PT (5pm UTC). Here are some links to bookmark so you can set a reminder for each session and contribute to the Tech Forum discussion:

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