The Centre for Electronic Product Engineering (CEPE) at the University of Glamorgan, Wales provides expertise to companies and research institutions in embedded Internet and GPRS data communication and has experience in product development for medical devices. Increasingly international competition requires that manufacturers of electronic and non-electronic products provide added features and value to their customers to remain competitive in the marketplace. New technologies, such as embedded Internet and contactless identification, not only enable the implementation of new features into existing products, but also allow new products to be developed. Manufacturers in the medical and health care market can particularly benefit from these technologies by adding remote access or contactless identification to their products.
The ability to access the product remotely, via the Internet or wireless over GPRS/3G, does not only allow the collection of diagnostic and treatment data from patients (telemedicine), but also to monitor the product utilisation for compliance, e.g. drug delivery. The use of Internet communication features provided by relatively low cost embedded, non-PC solutions is one cost effective mechanism for delivering this enhanced product performance. Contactless identification using RFId can provide a number of new features for the health care sector. RFId cannot only be used to identify a user or monitor the whereabouts of patients, but also allows to retrieve data collected over time, e.g. temperature on blood bags during transportation.

Embedding Internet connectivity into small-scale electronic systems offers a number of new opportunities for the medical and health care industry. Main advantage of this technology is the ability to collect data remotely and allow the examination of the data from any terminal via the Internet. Furthermore, the cost and size advantage by avoiding the use of a PC for the Internet connectivity allows the development of small-scale systems. CEPE is an independent centre able to offer services to small and large companies. It has a dedicated team which is backed up by the expertise of a number of research groups within the university.
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