Ioflow's Bluetooth LE wearable insulin pump system, which adopted the Nordic solution, has shown excellent performance in providing patients with insulin injections and blood sugar monitoring, and the Nordic solution is expected to be widely used in related wearable devices in the future.

Nordic Semiconductor (CEO Choi Soo-chul of Nordic Korea) announced on the 6th that domestic medical device company Eoflow has selected Nordic's nRF52832 Bluetooth® 5.2 and Bluetooth Low Energy (Bluetooth LE) universal multiprotocol System-on-Chip (SoC) for the wireless connectivity of its insulin management system, 'Eopatch'.

The Iopatch, which integrates Nordic's nRF52832 SoC, is a tubeless, wearable disposable insulin pump with no infusion line, measuring 49.5 x 39 x 14.5 mm, weighing 29.4 g (excluding insulin), and an IPX8 waterproof design (submersible up to 1 m for 24 hours).

Patients fill the iOpatch with insulin, attach it to their body to activate it, and then control the insulin dose from the patch using the Advanced Diabetes Manager (ADM; separate controller) or the 'Narsha' Android app running on a Bluetooth 4.2 (or higher) smartphone.

The IOPatch communicates with the ADM or smartphone via the Bluetooth LE connectivity of the Nordic SoC.

The iOpatch wearable insulin pump is powered by two LR44 alkaline batteries, which provide up to 3.5 days of continuous use thanks to the ultra-low power characteristics of the Nordic SoC.

The nRF52832 is designed to minimize power consumption with features such as 5.5mA peak RX/TX current on the 2.4GHz radio and a fully-automatic power management system that reduces power consumption by up to 80% compared to Nordic nRF51 Series SoCs.

Nordic's nRF52832 SoC embeds a 64MHz, 32-bit Arm® Cortex® M4 processor with floating-point unit (FPU), a 2.4GHz multiprotocol radio (supporting Bluetooth 5, ANT™, and proprietary 2.4GHz RF protocol software) that delivers 4dBm output power and -96dBm RX sensitivity for a link budget of 100dBm, as well as 256/512kB Flash memory and 32/64kB RAM.

The nRF Connect SDK (Software Development Kit) integrates the Zephyr RTOS and supports applications using Bluetooth LE, Bluetooth Mesh, and Thread. It also provides examples for all peripherals, as well as Bluetooth LE profiles and drivers.

The SDK also includes Nordic's Bluetooth SoftDevice controller, enabling migration from Nordic's proven SoftDevice used in the nRF52 Series. The nRF5 SDK continues to be available for development alongside the S132 SoftDevice, Nordic's Bluetooth 5-certified RF software protocol stack for implementing advanced Bluetooth LE applications.

“For Eoflow’s disposable wearable insulin injection solution, Eopatch, we adopted Nordic’s nRF52832 SoC because ultra-low power characteristics were very important in hardware functions, and for software functions, the Nordic nRF SDK and secure OTA-DFU (Over-The-Air Device Firmware Update) function were key,” said Park Kyung-ho, head of software development at Eoflow. “In addition, the quick response through the Nordic DevZone forum was very helpful during the product development process.”