Maxim Announces Ultra-Small 'h-Sensor Platform' for Wearables

Quickly and easily design wearable healthcare and fitness applications
Reduce design time by up to 6 months with a complete development platform supporting 'ARM mbed'.

Maxim Integrated Korea (CEO Choi Heon-jeong) announced the ultra-compact 'hSensor Platform' for wearables.

Designers of healthcare, wellness, and fitness applications can quickly and easily verify next-generation solutions with Maxim Integrated's ultra-compact h-sensor platform.

Developing a board with sensors is complex. Designers first develop custom hardware and firmware for concept verification, and then build a prototype before starting field testing. Evaluating sensors and existing solutions during the prototyping process takes a significant amount of time. The Maxim hSensor platform integrates all hardware components onto a printed circuit board (PCB) and allows for immediate hardware performance verification using the ARM mbed Hardware Development Kit (HDK), thereby accelerating the prototype development period by 3 to 6 months.

The h-sensor platform, provided as a reference design for the MAXREFDES100#, includes an h-sensor board, complete firmware with drivers, a debugger board, and a graphical user interface (GUI). The firmware source code for the h-sensor platform is available on the Maxim website, allowing designers to load algorithms suitable for different user environments and apply them to each application. By downloading firmware, you can optimize the design, evaluate it more quickly, and significantly shorten the time-to-market.

The hSensor platform is currently the only complete development platform available. It is ideal for healthcare, wellness, and high-end fitness products such as chest straps, electrocardiogram (ECG) patches, wrist-worn devices, thermometers, disposable body temperature patches, blood oxygen monitors, smart scales, and biometric authentication.

The Maxim hSensor platform provides inertial sensors (3-axis accelerometer, 6-axis accelerometer/gyroscope), atmospheric pressure sensors, flash memory, and low-power Bluetooth (BLE), along with products including the ultra-low-power single-channel integrated biopotential analog front-end (AFE) 'MAX30003', the high-sensitivity oxygen saturation and heart rate measurement sensor 'MAX30101', the industry's only clinical-grade temperature sensor 'MAX30205', the ultra-low-power ARM Cortex-M4F microcontroller (MCU) 'MAX32620' optimized for wearable devices, and the industry's lowest standby current power management semiconductor (PMIC) 'MAX14720'.

The Maxim hSensor platform enables rapid concept verification by reducing design time by up to six months with its complete hardware and firmware. Hardware design can be completed quickly by utilizing existing hardware and firmware. To facilitate efficient evaluation and rapid application prototyping, the mbed environment supports a high level of abstraction. Therefore, it requires no maintenance of software tools and provides a vast open source library.

The ultra-compact (25.4mm x 30.5mm) complete solution h-sensor platform provides everything needed on a single board without the need to access multiple sources. Data can be monitored via BLE, stored in flash, or streamed via USB. It operates on a coin cell battery.

Andrew Baker, Senior Director of Industry and Healthcare Products at Maxim Integrated, stated, “The hSensor platform is the result of Maxim’s commitment to the wearable market,” adding that Maxim will continue to develop solutions for new applications and expand the hSensor platform to support special use cases.

Matt Banet, Chief Scientific Officer (CSO) at toSense, stated, “After using the Maxim hSensor platform, the very complex development process became simpler and more efficient. Maxim provides an easy-to-use development kit to help successfully apply it to hardware platforms.”

“Thanks to Maxim’s new platform, we can skip the tedious process of developing custom boards from scratch. This is groundbreaking for cost reduction.” "As prices become more affordable, more consumers will be able to use fitness wearable products," he said.

Detailed information, high-resolution images, and block diagrams of the MAXREFDES100# can be found on the Maxim website. The MAXREFDES100# reference design is sold for $150 through the Maxim website and select franchise distributors. Hardware and firmware design files are available online for free.