I am in the phase of distributing the roles to the electronic components and the planning should close today the first timeline for the Sub-projects definition. I plan a series of posts explaining the reasons of the choices of every sub-architecture. These considerations are open to any contribution, suggestions, critics.
After an in-depth check of the features of the Bitscope oscilloscope the facts confirmed what I supposed before reading the documentation.
General considerations
Meditech acquisition unit should be shown as a series of different modules. There is a set of "standard" probes retrieving some of the basic health information based on commercial sensors (i.e. blood pressure, temperature, hearth rate) and a set of more uncommon probes that can be used depending on the needs. These probes (e.g. ECG terminals, just to cite the simplest) should be acquired with a relevant precision.
As a matter of fact the kind of hardware that better fit (almost perfectly) to assolve this task is just the Bitscope, not last for its reasonable price, essential electronic design and very reduced size with a more than acceptable quality of the samplings.
Bitscope flexibility
The flexibility of the tool - that is, the ability to acquire a wide range of different kind of data, digital and analog - can be considered the key factor for the choice.
But the very important aspect is, despite the "natural" role of the hardware, that it is a general purpose data acquisition and analysis tool: for a certain number of probes it is the perfect electronics!
As the next problem arises, the option to control the acquired signals, the problem is solved: first there is the compatibility with the Raspberry PI devices and second there is a full set of APIs to gain the control of the device programming it as the different measuring requires.
To grant the better timing and data resolution, at least in the product initial design and prototyping the less powerful Raspberry PI will be dedicated to control and manage the acquisition trend from the bitscope as an independent subsystem of the architecture.
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