Health Monitoring Products

Catron’s health monitoring products mainly employ PPG (photoplethysmogram), SCG (seismocardiogram), and ECG (electrocardiogram) technology to monitor vital signs, i.e., heart rate (HR), SpO2, blood pressure (BP), heart/pulmonary sounds, respiratory rate (RR), peak VO2, cardiac output, left ventricular (LV) filling pressure, etc.  The main features of Catron health monitoring products are that they are wearable and have high accuracy, low power, and are cost-effective. 

 

Catron’s design team has more than ten-years of experience in developing non-dispersive infrared (NDIR) gas sensors, i.e., MIR photoelectric sensors for high resolution and low detection limits. For health wearables, Catron focuses on using PPG sensors, which are a special type of photoelectric sensor for skin applications for monitoring vital signs with spectrum engineering. 

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There are many smart watches using PPG techniques to monitor heart rate and SpO2.  They all have different ways of designing PPG sensing into their products instead of using skin optics and photonic sensing technology.  Most products currently on the market tend to use too many LEDs and photodiodes (PDs). This not only increases the cost of the final product, but also wastes most of the battery power and available space within watches.  Sadly, those extra LEDs, PDs, and electrical currents do not help in achieving better performance; instead, they generate more noise, motion artifacts, and thermal instability.

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Catron applies skin optics, spectrum engineering, and advanced algorithms to the development of their PPG wearables, enabling photons to have improved focusing and increased wavelength tuning through the application of customized algorithms for signal processing implemented in secure micro-processors.  Catron’s PPG modules consume much less electrical current than products currently on market; the amount consumed is negligible compared to the amount of current used by a typical low power microprocessor.  In terms of performance, signal-to-noise ratios for Catron’s PPG wearables are 16dB better than the leading wrist-worn solutions.  With our skin optical design, our PPG wearables exhibit 10 times better perfusion index performance compared to the leading wrist-worn device. Unlike other solutions, Carton’s LED implementation results in no skin flashing.  Most importantly, Catron’s PPG modules use fewer and smaller components, which save on precious space and reduce the cost of the wearable.

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Here is an example result of one of Catron’s PPG finger-rings on the left-point finger from a male with Fitzpatrick Scale 3: