Tip on breaking the spiraling costs of developing electronics products for the medical market will be given in a presentation at Medelec, the new medical electronics conference and exhibition in Cambridge on the 29th November 2011. www.medelec.co.uk/

MEDELEC is the only technical event in the UK which focuses specifically on the increasingly important role that electronics components and embedded systems is playing in the design, development and manufacture of medical devices.

The presentation by John Hayes, Technical Manager at Cambridge Temperature Concepts, will use as an example the company’s Duofertility medical device, used to help couples with fertility problems, which went from a sheet of paper to being sold direct to consumers in less than 18 months with development costs below US$1m.

“The field of medical devices is famous for high costs, long development times, Byzantine revenue models and significant cash investment to bring a product to market,” said Hayes. “Breaking this pattern is crucial if we are to genuinely reduce the spiraling costs.”

In another presentation, Quentin Ochem, Technical Account manager at Adacore, will look at rules being enforced by IEC 62304 and the FDA to guarantee the safety of software in medical devices and the long certification process. “The outcome justifies the effort as the software produced is highly reliable,” said Ochem. “We will discuss the ever-increasing importance of software in medical devices, its need to be safe and various influencers that can make this happen.”

The talk will provide examples of how modern programming practices such as continuous integration or agile development can be used to address safety concerns, how the choice of the right programming language can impact testing and verification, and how shifting the emphasis of the software development cycle early can reduce costs and provide safer software.

Software will also be the subject of the presentation from Green hills software, concerning the cost of compliance and the risk of bringing a product to market that is unreliable, insecure or simply not safe. The presentation will examine some best practices using special purpose medical software development tools and operating systems in harmony with IEC 62304.

The recent rapid developments in MEMs sensor technology have enabled the realisation of truly innovative and adaptive movement and activity monitoring systems. This will be looked at by RP Lane from MLE Electronics and Southampton University. The presentation will discuss how it is now practical to use methods for measuring body movement in a home that were once only possible in a laboratory. “The challenge is now to demonstrate ways of intelligently combining sensors to produce subtleties of measurement not seen before,” said Lane. “A simple example of this would be to combine an accelerometer into a pulse detection device, if the information required is a resting heart rate, then the pulse would only be measured after a short period of relative stillness.”

In the associated exhibition, which has already sold out, Lauterbach will be showing the latest debug tools for medical electronics. “Having the right debug tools is a critical factor in the software development of medical devices,” said Barry Lock, UK Manager for Lauterbach. “We will demonstrate how our trace technology can assist engineers in ensuring code quality and code performance, and how we can help in achieving the necessary medical industry approvals.”

About MEDELEC

MEDELEC is the only technical event in the UK which focuses specifically on the increasingly important role that electronics components and embedded systems are playing in the design, development and manufacture of medical devices. The UK is a global centre of excellence in research and innovation, and this one-day conference and exhibition is being organised for electronics engineers and technical managers working in the clinical and healthcare sectors to learn about the very latest advances in medical electronics through the technical seminar programme and workshops, view demonstrations of innovative software and hardware technologies, and network with peers. This event will be held on 29th November 2011 in Cambridge.