Accurately Counting Every “Eye” Advantech Helps Create a Fully Automatic Non-Contact Tonometer

　　Introduction: Eyes are one of the most important organs in the human senses, clear and translucent eyes can appreciate the beauty of the world. Taking care of your eyes and protecting your eyes is a major focus of body care. In addition to visual inspections, regular eye pressure testing is also required. Intraocular pressure is the pressure of the contents of the eyeball on the wall of the eyeball, and it is an important indicator for judging whether the eye is healthy or not. Normal intraocular pressure can keep the eyeball in a normal shape, high intraocular pressure will compress the optic nerve in the fundus, resulting in decreased vision, and low intraocular pressure will cause the eyeball to shrink and shrink.

Device application scenarios

With the development of medical technology, the test of intraocular pressure is becoming more and more convenient and fast, and the test can be completed by using a small tonometer. Tonometer can assist in the diagnosis of cataracts, glaucoma and other eye diseases. The non-contact tonometer is now commonly used, which has the advantages of simple operation and rapid measurement. The non-contact tonometry instrument does not directly contact the eyeball. During the inspection, the gas pulse force in the instrument flattens a specific area in the center of the cornea, and the intraocular pressure is converted according to the relationship between the required force and the intraocular pressure. The measurement method is safe and efficient, and the user experience is good.

A large domestic ophthalmic equipment company has recently developed a fully automatic non-contact tonometer. It needs a single-board computer with reliable quality, long-term supply and stable service support.

Device Application Requirements

The customer’s product is designed as a small medical tester. In order to facilitate portability and transfer, the overall equipment should not be too large, and the main control part needs a small single-board computer. At the same time, the use of the tonometer is an interactive connection between the medical care, the machine, and the subject. It requires the access of the medical and nursing operation terminal, the access to the collecting terminal of the subject’s physical information, and the output of the instrument information processing, which requires a single-board computer. It has multiple interfaces, including: LVDS+USB touch control screen, USB2.0 connection control board, support WIFI module expansion, support LTE 4G module expansion, USB3.0 connection camera signal, RS485 connection power system (including motor, jet module) .

Project pain point analysis

Specific size requirements: Due to the project size requirements, and the need to support both WIFI and LTE modules, and various interfaces such as 3-way USB, it is not easy to find standard products that meet customer needs under the 2.5-inch size requirement;

Professional technical support: Arm requires more professional technical service support than X86, and needs a supplier that can continuously provide professional technical support services during the development process;

Long-term supply: It is necessary to ensure that the product can have supply support for up to ten years;

　Advantech solutions with multiple advantages

1. Flexible customized services: In order to solve customer application needs and pain points, Advantech provided it with the RSB-3720, a 2.5-inch single-board computer with Arm architecture. RSB-3720 adopts NXP i.MX8M Plus platform solution, supports WIFI and LTE module expansion at the same time, supports 1 channel HDMI and 1 channel LVDS Display interface, 2 channel network ports, 1*USB3.0 and 1*USB2.0, etc., RSB -3720 also supports UIO expansion card, which can flexibly expand interface signals according to customer needs. The operating system supports Yocto, Android, Ubuntu, and provides professional services to create product value with customers.

2. Industrial-grade quality

Advantech has 40 years of design experience in industrial motherboard design, with reasonable design and reliable quality. The products have ultra-high protection standards to ensure that customers’ medical equipment can successfully pass industry certifications such as medical safety regulations. The MTBF time exceeds 50,000 hours and the failure rate is less than 2‰. It can be seen that the advantages of choosing Advantech are also very obvious——

First of all, Advantech products have a long life cycle. For example, Advantech RSB-3720 2.5-inch single board is designed based on the latest NXP i.MX 8M Plus platform. The overall product life cycle is expected to be as long as 10 years, which meets customer supply time requirements;

Secondly, the local chemical team, especially the customers in the medical industry, has rich experience and outstanding local technical service capabilities, which can effectively assist customers to solve their doubts related to medical equipment.

Third, to ensure stable supply, Advantech has two major production bases in Kunshan and Taipei, with stable production and fast delivery to better serve global customers.

3. All-round support from the ARM team

Advantech has a team of low-level software engineers with an average industry experience of more than 10 years, and has very rich experience in Linux, Yocto, Ubuntu, Debian, UOS, Kylin, Android and other operating systems. It can support the underlying firmware according to the customer’s application requirements, from booting UBOOT, EC/MCU, kernel optimization and tailoring, file system customization, development environment construction to application layer related software integration and adaptation, Advantech RISC/Arm team can Provide comprehensive support to customers.

The performance characteristics of RSB-3720 can refer to the following points –

1. NXP Arm® Cortex®-A53 i.MX 8M Plus Quad/Dual Core up to 1.8 GHz
2. Onboard LPDDR4 4 GB/6 GB, 4000MT/s memory
3. 60Hz HDMI 1920×1080, 1 single-channel or 1 dual-channel 24-bit LVDS (or 1 4-channel MIPI-DSI by BOM option)
4. 1x 4-wire RS-232/422/485, 1x USB3.2 Gen1 By 1, 1 USB2.0, 1xMicro SD, 1x Mic In/Out
5. 1 mini-PCIe for 3G/4G, 1 M.2 2230 key E slot
6. Supports Yocto Linux and Android
7. Supports I/O expansion boards via UIO40 Express