Belfast’s B-Secur has announced a key collaboration with US-headquartered Texas Instruments (TI) to "help accelerate the design of next-generation consumer wearable devices."
TI will provide high-performing sensing capabilities for wearable devices like premium smartwatches and medical grade heart-rate monitors, which will enabe advanced features for identification, wellness and health monitoring in Internet of Things (IoT) devices.
The news follows an announcement from B-Secur earlier this year that it has received US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) clearance for its innovative HeartKey ECG software.
B-Secur’s HeartKey technology consists of a suite of powerful ECG or heart algorithms that uniquely combine user identification, health, and wellness to generate accurate data encrypted through the user’s unique heartbeat.
Alan Foreman, Chief Executive Officer, B-Secur commented: “This announcement is hugely significant for B-Secur and will enable medical-grade heart health monitoring to become widely available in the consumer wearables sector.
“As more and more wearable and IoT devices adopt ECG technology, supplying a fully integrated, high-performance solution with Texas Instruments means our customers around the world can bring their own consumer wearable products to market quicker and with greater confidence.”
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The combination of HeartKey and TI’s AFE4950 enables device manufacturers and partners around the world to eliminate months of R&D with a fully integrated sensor, electrical and signal processing solution.
Karthik Soundarapandian, product line manager for medical imaging at TI, said: “The trend in consumer electronics is to add more health monitoring into smartwatches and other wearables.
“This, in combination with a patient’s medical history, can help health professionals with early detection and prevention of disease. The precision signal quality from the AFE4950-based hardware, combined with B-Secur’s algorithms, will help wearables manufacturers design solutions that make clinical-quality monitoring more accessible to a wider population.”
Founded in Belfast and headquartered at Catalyst in The Innovation Centre, B-Secur aims "to revolutionise the way people experience technology in the connected world using their unique heartbeat."
The company currently employs 35 engineers and has partnered with multiple global technology companies.
