EnableRx – Enabling technologies for next generation medical diagnostics

Our Mission: EnableRx is an organization dedicated to creating innovative, low-cost, modular, scalable and interoperable telemedicine solutions that can be implemented across the planet and in space applications. Our goal is to provide medical diagnostic and device solutions that take advantage of the internet, cloud computing and current and next generation blue-tooth technologies.

Strategic Summary: EnableRx will build and scale the applications appropriate to the market. In developing nations, our primary target includes pregnant women living in impoverished conditions and their caregivers including physicians, nurses and midwives. The most important markers to observe among pregnant women include body weight, blood glucose, blood pressure and heart rate. We have also focused on microscopy and other diagnostic devices and metrics.
Progress Summary: EnableRx has successfully prototyped blood glucose monitors to communicate to Android devices through Bluetooth technology to transmit and receive signals in the form of data and instructions. In addition, we have prototyped USB microscopes to communicate to Android devices.

Future Plans: By 2012, we will have an open platform based on the Android OS. The platform will contain protocols and applications that allow device designers and OEMs to integrate and scale their devices within the EnableRx platform. Patients and healthcare providers can use the devices, obtain data and integrate it with the cloud. They will have the ability to access free and premium services based on a hybrid “freemium” model to remotely monitor data and track long term health trends. Public health policy providers can study health trends using data blinded for privacy.

In our submission, we present a summary of one of our prototypes as a sample of the EnableRx system.

The EnableRx Blood Pressure Monitor

The monitor consists of an android operating system based application that establishes contact with the blood pressure monitor via bluetooth communication protocol. The application searches for pre-registered bluetooth enabled blood pressure monitors in the vicinity. Once the device has been identified, the user interface allows the user to measure the blood pressure through a simple click on the phone.

The android phone operates the blood pressure measurement unit via bluetooth communication. The measurement procedure has been implemented according to standard medical conventions where a wrist pump supplies air into the wrist cuff for 60 seconds and measures the pressure values observed over the entire time duration. These values are transferred to the android phone after 60 seconds and the diastolic/systolic values of the blood pressure are displayed on the android phone application user interface.

The blood pressure sensor used in this product consumes power less than 0.2 mW and has a range of 0 to 37 kPa. The sensor's signal conditioning circuit have been designed such that they are immune to noisy signals caused by several environmental factors. The system operates using 2*1.5V AA batteries.