DESIGN OF A CUSTOM ASIC INCORPORATING CAN™ AND 1 ...

Wearable sensor technology is a new application emerging recently in the medical field
that would benefit from a merger of CAN and 1 – Wire® protocols. Wearable devices can be
widely used in clinical care, home health care, hospice, special people monitoring, elderly care
and assistance, psychological evaluation, physical training and many other medical areas.
Wearable technology may provide an integral part of the solution for providing healthcare to a
growing world population that will be strained by a ballooning ageing population. By providing
a means to conduct telemedicine – the monitoring, recording, and transmission of physiological
signals from outside of the hospital – wearable technology solutions could ease the burden on
health-care personnel and use hospital space for more emergent or responsive care. In addition,
employing wearable technology in professions where workers are exposed to dangers or hazards
could help save their lives and protect health-care personnel [32]. In addition to providing a
rugged, reliable communications backbone, combining the ability and ease of CAN-enabling
an electrical device or component with the variety of 1 – Wire® devices used for medical
consumable IDs would provide an almost unlimited type and number of body measurements,
movements, and functions that could be monitored by wearable sensor technology and medical
devices.
4.3 Challenging Problems
In designing a custom interface merging two communication protocols, a number of
potentially challenging, technical problems had to be addressed such as combining a multi-
master and a single-master protocol, messages by IDs and messages by addressing, event-
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