Power Supply Requirements for Medical Devices
CONTENT:
Medical devices provide healthcare professionals with unparallel support in the medical diagnosis and treatment process. They can be divided into treatment, diagnosis, and auxiliary medical devices. They are essential to prevent, diagnose, treat, and rehabilitate illnesses and diseases in a safe and effective way.
Medical professionals often rely on these devices on a daily basis. Any malfunctioning or incorrect data could potentially have a significant impact on a patient's diagnosis and treatment. This is especially true for medical devices which come into direct contact with a patient to complete their function. As defined in the 60601-1 standards, these applied parts are classified into three main types based on their protection levels against electric shock - Including type B, type BF, and type CF.
Some devices also need to continuously monitor and record a patient's data, making the selection of medical device power supplies a task that must be approached with great care. In fact, these devices need to be able to provide long-term, stable, accurate data at any time of the day and for longer periods.
Below we will review more in detail some of the systematic challenges and power supply requirements of medical devices.
The Challenges for Medical Device Manufacturers
Only the medical devices that comply with the 60601-1 standards are possible to safeguard the patient's safety. At the same time, it is also crucial to take into consideration the budget and resources available for the selection and maintenance of these medical devices. Accordingly, some of the challenges associated with medical equipment can be summarized as follows:
● High requirements for safety and reliability
Medical device manufacturers are faced with the hard challenge of designing products that can be powered for long periods without impacting the patient's safety. For example, exposure to even small leakage currents can have an adverse effect on a patient's well-being.
● Stable and reliable performance
Medical devices need to be spared from any power interruptions or similar effects which could potentially influence the collection, analysis, and evaluation of clinical data. Medical device designers and manufacturers need to keep the healthcare users' needs in mind for ensuring that their medical equipment is always up to standards.
● Reasonable pricing at a compact size
Medical clinics and hospitals are often tasked with procuring quality medical equipment within a defined budget. Increasingly more people also care about their health condition by proactively monitoring their health status through numerous self-checking apps and portable medical devices. This creates an extra challenge for designers and manufacturers, which are tasked with offering medical devices that can effectively balance quality and safety with affordability and convenience.
The global COVID-19 pandemic has led to an upsurge in technologies used for disinfection, disease spread detection and prevention. Recently, demand has increased worldwide for medical devices, with a particular focus on those used for disease treatment and patient management.
Medical Power Supply Requirements
As modern medical equipment becomes increasingly more smart and convenient, there is an even stronger need for power supplies that are compact, lightweight, efficient, cost-effective, reliable, and super-safe. Engineers and designers of power supplies for medical equipment can find the right balance between performance and reliability through careful design and an astringent component selection process.
Power supplies for medical applications should respond to the following criteria:
● Compliance with medical safety standards
Power supplies for medical devices need to comply with a series of quality standards for the medical industry, including, for example, the EN60601-1 and ANSI/AAMI ES60601-1 standards. Besides, the power supplies used in medical devices also need to have sufficiently low patient leakage current and high isolation voltage, to ensure higher patient safety.
● Reliable performance
Medical equipment needs to operate for long periods while still providing reliable and energy-efficient performance. The reliability and high-performance aspects can be measured by looking at the power supplies' power efficiency, temperature range, isolation capacitance, MTBF, and more aspects.
● Compact design
Modern medical devices are becoming increasingly smaller and more portable, resulting in a growing need for compact power supplies. However, a compact design of medical devices and their power supplies should also not come at the expense of their performance and reliability.
MORNSUN's Power Solutions for Medical Devices
The trend in medical devices is to make them smaller, more lightweight, more efficient, more reliable, and competitively priced. All without compromising on quality and with strong compliance with the safety standards for medical equipment based on the specific application.
Medical equipment manufacturers and electrical engineers should take care to choose power supplies from a reputable supplier, preferably with proven experience in providing power converters for medical applications. Even better, the supplier should have a good understanding of the special demands and changing standards involved in the medical device industry.
With over 23 years in the power supply industry, MORNSUN matches this profile perfectly. We do not only understand the challenges associated with powering medical devices, but we can also provide a series of power supplies for these specific applications.
Our power supply solutions for medical devices are designed to meet and solve the most common challenges associated with these applications. Our AC/DC converters and DC/DC converters for medical equipment can provide high reliability and a high performance-price ratio. In terms of reliability, our G_S-R3 and H_S-R3 Series can offer a current leakage lower than 2µA with power isolation of 5000VAC. The high performance of these power supplies is guaranteed by their wide temperature range (between -40°C and 105°C), low isolation capacitance (5pF), and an MTBF of 19360 hours. High performance and high reliability don't come at the expense of low affordability. Our power supply solutions are designed and manufactured in accordance with several quality standards in the medical industry. Some of these standards include EN60601-1, ANSI/AAMI ES60601-1 (2xMOPP). Our power supplies for medical devices are UL/IEC/EN/BS EN 62368 certified.
Medical and healthcare devices also require increasingly more compact, high-efficiency, reliable, and economical power supplies. In response to this growing demand, MORNSUN has organized a new series of high-power density AC/DC switching power supplies, the LOF Series. This series of MORNSUN AC/DC Converters is suitable for BF applications and conforms to the medical safety standards, including 2xMOPP. The LOF Series has an (85)90-264 VAC input voltage and a leakage current below 0.1mA.
Contact us to request more information about our power supply series for medical devices or to request a sample. We look forward to supporting your next medical equipment circuit design project with a series of reliable, safe, and affordable power supplies.
