Optimization of mass-produced wireless consumer medical devices using a prognostics approach

An unforeseen medical devices failure can lead to fatality. Many consumers in good health tend to forget about the importance of medical device reliability and robustness. The breakdown of virtually any medical instrument can have deadly consequences for the patients who rely on them. Deadly consequences lead to grief, lawsuits, and severe monetary losses for families, physicians and biomedical companies. Though prognostics methodology has been widely used in the area of consumer electronics, its applications to medical instrumentation have been largely overlooked. This is an important area of research with the potential to have enormous practical applications and return on investment in the foreseeable future.