Renesas demos glucose meter kit

The demo kit is based on the company's V850 microcontroller with certified Continua Blood Glucose agent software. The V850 mcus, at about 350uA/DMIPS with up to 1MB of Flash and integrated usb support, are optimised to handle the added software load without sacrificing battery life. "Low power, high performance microcontrollers enable Continua healthcare devices to store time stamped measurements and automatically send the data to healthcare professionals," said Renesas in a statement. "By eliminating the error prone process of manually collecting such measurement data, Continua devices help improve the quality of medical data and of the diagnosis. The challenge in implementing these devices is that collecting and communicating the data adds a significant software burden to existing medical products." The company claims its 32bit V850ES/Jx3-L mcus eliminate this problem by offering high energy efficiency, at 1.9 DMIPS/MHz, which enables the V850 devices to process more data than other mcus at a lower frequency.