According to the World Health Organization (WHO), fever is a symptom in around 88 percent of confirmed Covid-19 cases and the frontline of the healthcare industry is putting themselves at risk during this Covid-19 pandemic. For contactless measurement and continuous monitoring of patient temperature, Nordic Semiconductor’s first official module partner in India, CWD Innovations has come up with a device named SmartTemp+. The company chose Nordic’s nRF52832 Bluetooth Low Energy (Bluetooth LE) System-on-Chip (SoC) to provide the short-range wireless connectivity and core processing power for its ‘SmartTemp+’ continuous body temperature monitoring system.
CWD Innovations’ SmartTemp+ is a safe alternative to infrared, digital, and mercury-based thermometers for use in healthcare, government, and home environments. It wirelessly sends body temperature data to a smartphone app or gateway. It also sends configurable alerts when the body temperature rises above or falls below the patient’s appropriate thresholds and GPS tagging and geofencing for patients under quarantine.
The 3cm-diameter wearable device when attached to the patient’s axial region (including the head, neck, and chest) reliably and accurately measure the patient’s body temperature for 15 days with no additional intervention. All thanks to its built-in temperature sensor! The nRF52832 SoC’s powerful 32-bit Arm Cortex M4 processor designed to support the Floating Point (FP) and Digital Signal Processing (DSP) along with the SoC’s generous memory allocation (512kB Flash memory and 64kB RAM), provides ample processing resource for supervising the SmartTemp+’s advanced edge computing algorithms.
Nordic SoC-enabled Bluetooth LE connectivity enables the temperature data to be automatically transmitted at the interval of every 60 seconds (or other configured advertising frequency) from the device to a Bluetooth 4.0 (and later) smartphone. The users can view the information and self-monitor through the iOS and Android ‘SmartTemp+’ companion app. The other option would be the transmission of data to a proprietary gateway within a hospital using Bluetooth LE which is then relayed to a Cloud-based dashboard where the information can be monitored by healthcare professionals or health authorities. The ultra-low power characteristics of the Nordic SoC enables SmartTemp+ that uses a CR2032 coin cell battery makes it capable of being used continuously for one month.
