Developing the motherboard of a connected healthcare gateway
Client: OpenCare Connect
Industry: Medical Technology / Healthcare
Service: Hardware Design, Electronics Engineering, Embedded Software
OpenCare Connect provides healthcare organisations with a digital infrastructure for automation and data, covering prevention, vitality monitoring, and safety. At the heart of their system is a hardware gateway that connects care environments to their cloud platform.
SPINNOV developed the motherboard of that gateway, integrating a Raspberry Pi compute platform with audio capabilities and the serial communication interfaces needed to connect to care facility hardware.
Client & Goal
Healthcare organisations increasingly rely on connected infrastructure to support their staff and residents, monitoring wellbeing, automating routine processes, and maintaining safety across a facility. OpenCare Connect built a cloud-based platform to serve exactly this need, providing care organisations with data and tooling across prevention, vitality, and safety domains.
For that platform to work, it needs a reliable hardware presence inside the care environment itself. The goal was to develop the motherboard of the OpenCare Gateway, the physical device that connects a care facility's local systems to the OpenCare cloud, handling communication, audio, and data exchange between the two.
Challenge
A gateway device serving a healthcare environment has to be robust and reliable above all else. It runs continuously, often unattended, in facilities where the services it supports, safety alerts, wellbeing monitoring, communication, need to work without interruption. The motherboard design had to bring together a Raspberry Pi compute platform, audio processing hardware, and RS485/RS428 serial interfaces into a cohesive, stable system that could operate dependably in that context.
Serial communication interfaces like RS485 are commonly used in building and care facility infrastructure, intercoms, nurse call systems, access control, and integrating them correctly into the gateway required careful attention to signal integrity and compatibility with the range of devices the gateway would need to talk to.
SPINNOV’s Solution
Custom motherboard: integrating Raspberry Pi compute platform, audio chips, and serial communication interfaces into a single, stable hardware design
RS485 / RS428 interfaces: serial communication capability for connecting to care facility infrastructure and devices
Audio integration: audio chip support enabling voice and sound functionality within the gateway
Embedded software: firmware supporting hardware initialisation, interface management, and cloud connectivity