Technology behemoth Texas Instruments has allocated $15 million to fund medical-technology research at select universities. The money will support R&D of emerging medical technologies over a period of several years, across a variety of areas, including personal medical devices, implantables, medical imaging, wireless healthcare systems and biosensor technology.
Texas Instruments’ technology is currently being used throughout the medical field, in such areas as portable imaging, wireless communications for patient monitoring, retinal prosthesis and DSP-based robotics for amputees. The company’s expertise in semiconductor technologies — high-performance analog, digital signal processing, ultra-low-power microcontrollers, wireless connectivity and DLP(R) — make it a viable player in the development of new medical devices.
“In the 1990s, wireless communications systems, cell phones and PDAs were major areas of R&D and leading market drivers in the electronics industry,” said Kent Novak, vice president of Texas Instruments’ medical business unit, in a statement. “An outgrowth of these developments is higher system integration and lower power requirements. Many new and emerging medical systems are now utilizing these established technologies to improve patient monitoring in hospitals, for feature-enhanced personal care devices, and for rapidly modernizing healthcare systems in developing countries where standardized healthcare is virtually nonexistent.”
For information about submitting funding proposals, visit www.ti.com/medical.