PSoC™ 4: Designing a portable battery-powered blood glucose monitor

Regular blood glucose monitoring is an essential and everyday aspect of anyone who has diabetes. Knowing your blood glucose (blood sugar) level can dictate how you balance your food intake, when to undertake exercise activities, and when to take any prescription medicines. Blood glucose monitors typically incorporate a lancet-based sensor that takes a blood sample, but units that continuously monitor glucose levels use a sensor placed just under the skin. Having portable and battery-powered monitors gives users the most confidence they can check levels anytime and anywhere.

From an engineering perspective, including all the required features into a compact, battery-powered, hand-held unit that incorporates an easy-to-read display is essential.

Ideal product specifications include -

• Low power characteristics in operation to prolong battery life between recharging or replacing the batteries
• A simple user interface using capacitive touch buttons that will work in all conditions
• Ideally, a single-IC solution that can interface with any of the optical or electrochemical sensors typically used for blood glucose monitoring

Design solution based on PSoC™ 4 - Your problem solver on chip

The PSoC™ 4 family of 32-bit programmable and configurable system-on-chip processors offers a comprehensive line-up of devices with various flexible analog and digital functions. Analog functions include analog-to-digital converters (ADC), low-power comparators, opamps, and digital-to-analog converters (DAC). Digital logic features are available in universal digital blocks (UDB) capable of configuration to provide many different discrete functions such as PWMs and peripheral interfaces. In addition, PSoC™ 4 integrates Infineon's award-winning capacitive touch sensing technology CapSense. 

The proposed PSoC™ 4 single-IC blood glucose monitor design illustrates the comprehensive feature-set of PSoC™ 4. The analog signal conditioning, multiplexing, and analog-to-digital conversion blocks allow the integration of the required optical or electromechanical sensors. PSoC™ 4's low-power modes allow embedded developers to prolong battery life, and the CapSense capacitive buttons ensure operation under all conditions.

PSoC™ 4 - Your problem solver on chip

The flexible, programmable, and reconfigurable features provided by PSoC™ 4 deliver a compact, low-power, single-chip solution that integrates blood glucose monitoring and a reliable user interface.