Nick Flaherty highlights that smaller operations can make it in the big wide world of medical applications.
Established wisdom is that the medical market is no place for startups. While the margins are good and the need for more intelligent systems grows as the Western world's population ages, getting medical approvals can take an age, and the liabilities and legal issues can sink a small firm.
But this hasn't put off a group of recent Cambridge graduates who have a new approach to temperature sensing for medical applications.
After winning various business plan competitions and backing from angel investors, Cambridge Temperature Concepts has opted to go for the high end of the fertility market with its DuoFertility system in a move which also lessens its liabilities risk.
The system uses a wireless sensor to regularly and accurately measure a woman's temperature to indicate when she is most fertile. The temperature sensor is accurate to 0.1 degree and sends data to a reader through a passive RFID link, allowing the battery to have a life of 6 to 9 months.
The key is a precision of 0.001 degree that allows the sensor to calculate the heat flow and so work out the core temperature, rather than measuring the surface temperature. This allows the sensor to be used under the arm, rather than somewhere more intimate.
Measuring core temperature regularly and easily opens up many, many interesting medical applications. The choice now is which areas to go for, and how to get the costs down. The original prototype was developed with just a Farnell catalogue for company, but a 130nm mixed signal ASIC is in the works - the question is now how to pay for it.
This also hasn't been an issue for Toumaz Technology in Oxford. A spinoff from Imperial College London, the founder and technology developer, Prof Chris Toumazou, last week won the 2009 World Technology Award for health and medicine in New York, beating 16 other global finalists and nominees.
Toumaz developed a custom chip for medical applications using ultra low power mixed signal technology that is used for the Sensium 'digital plaster' system.
Q5 Interview - Professor Chris Toumazou, Institute of Biomedical Engineering, Imperial College
This links a wireless sensor for monitoring in a plaster, and Toumaz has used this technology for the hardware, software and systems for the DIAdvisor, a €7.1m pan-European project to allow diabetes patients to analyse data retrieved from glucose measurements, insulin delivery data and specific patient measurements via a PDA.
A clinical trial of 90 patients across three sites in France, Italy and Czech Republic is now rolling out across Europe through a consortium of 13 medical, industrial and academic partners.
This is also good business for consultancies such as Hidalgo in Cambridge, which is also working on wireless sensing for medical applications, including military applications on the battlefield. Hidalgo is putting together sensor and robust, secure wireless technologies with different terminals, including mobile phones.
So smaller operations can make it in the big wide world of medical applications - the trick is to be smart - both in the technology but also in the business plan, and that's there the technologists can sometimes come unstuck.
Nick Flaherty has been covering technology since 1990 and is based in Bristol, where he co-founded the SiliconSouthWest network. During that time he has worked for most of the electronics magazines and newspapers in the UK and several in Europe and the US, covering all areas of the industry. He blogs at www.flaherty.co.uk.
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See also: the Electronics Weekly blog On Air, covering news on developments and funding for electronics startups.