PSoC™6: Designing a fitness tracker with Bluetooth connectivity

Personal wearable fitness trackers are extremely popular. Usually worn on the wrist, the trackers monitor an individual's vital signs, such as heart rate and oxygen absorption levels, and provide various other exercise statistics. Typically connected to a person's smartphone, they have quickly replaced the traditional watch, and many people wear one all day, not just during exercise.

Designing a new fitness tracker to compete in an already busy market requires a careful design approach. A rigorous component selection is crucial with the need to gather data from many analog or digital sensors, offer consumers good battery life between charges and smartphone connectivity. Also, the physical size constraints of a wrist-worn tracker stipulate a small and light device with the maximum screen size possible.

Ideal product specifications include - 

• Powerful capabilities for intensive analog and digital sensor aggregation and processing
• Operate for as long as possible between charging cycles
• Bluetooth Low Energy connectivity to a smartphone
• Provide voice command interface to a smartphone
• A sleek and intuitive user interface using capacitive touch sensing buttons, proximity sensors, and sliders
• Minimize bill of materials component count and costs
• Keep PCB space to a minimum

Design solution based on PSoC™™ 6 - Purpose-built for the IoT

The PSoC™ 6 family of programmable and reconfigurable system-on-chip processors incorporate many flexible analog and digital functions. PSoC™ meets the IoT's requirements for processing performance, wireless connectivity, and low-power credentials by bridging the gap between power-hungry application processors and resource-limited microcontrollers. With the PSoC™ 6 line-up, the PSoC™ 63 connectivity line balances the needs of high-performance processing with low power 22 µA/MHz active mode consumption characteristics. Featuring a 150-MHz Arm Cortex-M4 core, a low-power BLE 5.0 transceiver, and Infineon's leading and reliable CapSense capacitive touch and proximity sensing technology, the PSoC™ 63 offers a one-chip fitness tracker solution.

PSoC™ 6 - Purpose-built for the IoT

With the highly integrated, programmable, and communication capabilities PSoC™ 6 offers, design engineers tasked with building a BLE-enabled fitness tracker can quickly develop a compact, energy-efficient, product with minimal BOM.