Description: Memory and storage are important components for all modern electronic devices, but few devices present the kind of unique challenges faced when supplying components for medical wearables. In medical wearable devices, low-power operation is paramount, alongside compact design, and limited-air-flow thermal management.
Medical wearables have improved dramatically over the past couple of decades. From large, bespoke, bulky devices with limited power and capabilities, to sleek, comfortable devices that blur into our everyday technologies. Fitness trackers, blood glucose monitors, smart hearing aids, sleep monitors, and more, all contribute to a more data-driven way of managing our health.
For the teams building them,developing these devices presents a number of unique challenges in manufacturing and design, however, especially with regards to memory and storage. They have to contend with fitting enough storage and memory inside the physical confines of devices designed to be lightweight and intrinsically wearable. There are also thermal headroom constraints to consider, and battery life issues, both of which memory and storage have a major impact on.
Increasing Demands
Modern medical wearables are expected to do more, more often, and for longer periods of time – all while being largely invisible. Unlike most technological devices which are designed to work well almost exclusively while in hand and in view, medical wearables are expected to operate consistently with minimal input from the wearer.
A lot of modern medical wearables are built around continuous, or near-continuous monitoring, a trend that continues to drive growth across the global wearable device market. That might be sleep staging overnight, biometric signals throughout the day, steps and activity, or trend data for blood glucose. Either way, it means a steady stream of sensor readings that must be captured reliably and handled efficiently. And that data needs to stick around long enough to be useful, whether it’s being viewed by the wearer, a clinician, or feeding into a wider care pathway.
That shift has some very real product consequences. More sensing and more processing means more power draw, which directly impacts battery life and charging frequency. It can also mean more heat, and in such compact physical designs, wearables have limited thermal headroom; especially considering their proximity to the user. These devices live in the real world, too, and can react differently to different bodies, different climates, and different wearing habits. All of that can push a design out of its comfort zone. In medical wearables, consistent behaviour isn’t just a “nice to have,” it’s a credibility issue.
Most products also sit somewhere between cloud-first and local-first. Regular syncing and backups make long-term analysis easier and unlock richer services, but broadcasting data and network connectivity cost power, especially if you’re uploading often, or continuously. Push more analytics onto the device and you can cut the reliance on connectivity, but you typically pay for it elsewhere with higher demand on onboard compute and the memory system. The power budget is important in either case, even though it’s impacted in different ways. That’s why, regardless of the type of medical wearable you’re developing, component choice (and the balance of memory, storage, and other components) matters so much.
For manufacturers and product leaders, the job is balancing capability with practicality: delivering reliable sensing and a responsive experience, without turning the device into something that runs hot, needs constant charging, or degrades in the field after a year or two.
Memory and storage are not background components or afterthoughts. They are part of the commercial and product-risk equation, and an important one at that.
How Memory and Storage Drive Design and Business
Memory and storage are important technical considerations during the design process, but they’re also the key component in shaping the viability, profitability, and scalability of a product.
In medical wearables, battery life is user retention. If a medical wearable is designed for consistent operation throughout a wakeful day, then its memory and storage considerations need to facilitate battery life that will last at least that long, and ideally longer to account for battery degradation over the lifetime of the device. Once that device runs out of battery, the user removes it and that ends the stream of data which makes it so useful in the first place.
Immediate access to that data and the extrapolations of its analyses are important for device credibility, making the choice of memory and storage and their design within the wearable paramount for long-term adoption. Medical wearables are seen more like medical devices than they are traditional tech products, so users expect to be able to get access to the information on them immediately and with no connectivity issues. Ensuring the storage is adequate for the quantity of data being recorded and locally accessible, as well as the memory to facilitate fast data storage and access, are paramount to ensure the device continues to retain its reputation as a medical device, and not a cheap wearable with limited function.
As memory and storage supply is constrained, the cost of these components is an increasingly substantive part of the device bill of materials (BOM). Not only that, limited availability can affect scalability, and while the latest standards may offer advantages in performance and efficiency, it may be that older components in more readily available and reliable supply, may offer a quality all of their own.
In Medical Wearables, Component Choice is key to Business Outcome
Medical wearables are designed to fit into day-to-day life, whilst giving us unique insights into our health. They need to track key metrics about our bodies and habits as unobtrusively as possible – and that’s arguably how the memory and storage decisions need to be when developing medical wearables.
Battery life can impact how often a device is used and arguably more importantly, how long it continues to be a part of the wearer’s day-to-day life. Consistent performance is important for ongoing trust, too, as that device needs to be reliably available and perform as expected for months or years. Safe data handling gives peace of mind and the true long-term value of the platform, too, opening up new analytics opportunities in the future, and greater chance of customer retention when the next generation launches. That’s important whether it’s supporting a clinician workflow, a remote monitoring program, or a consumer subscription service.
That’s why memory and storage choices need to be carefully considered during development. If you get them right, you protect comfort, reliability, and the ability to scale, whilst maintaining affordable costs and access to the hardware you need for consistent manufacturing to hit shipping schedules. For manufacturers developing connected healthcare devices, smart health monitoring systems, and next-generation medical wearables, integrated memory and storage solutions are becoming a critical part of overall smart healthcare system design.
In medical wearables, component decisions are business decisions.
For developers looking to address these challenges, highly integrated memory and storage solutions can help simplify design while improving efficiency and reliability.
ePoP5X: A Highly Integrated Memory and Storage Solution for Medical Wearables
BIWIN’s 201-ball ePoP5X integrates LPDDR5X memory and eMMC 5.1 storage into a single package, helping reduce PCB footprint and simplify system design. As medical wearables continue to evolve toward smaller form factors, longer battery life, and more advanced sensing capabilities, highly integrated memory and storage solutions play an increasingly important role in balancing performance, power efficiency, and reliability.
Designed for space-constrained wearable devices, ePoP5X supports efficient data processing and dependable local storage for continuous monitoring applications. Its integrated architecture helps streamline system development while enabling thinner, lighter, and more power-efficient designs. By combining memory and storage in a compact solution, ePoP5X helps manufacturers address key wearable design challenges while supporting the reliability and user experience expected from modern healthcare devices.
