Application of High-density Electrical Connectors in the Medical Field (1)

The demand for high-density electrical connectors in the medical market is increasing. The irreversible trend of connectors in the medical field is becoming smaller, lighter and more ergonomic. This trend has strongly driven demand growth.

These requirements will also face a series of standards and customer solutions, but providing the correct solution is not as simple as installing a PIN needle into an existing custom medical connector. Due to the combination of International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) specifications and safety regulations in other regions, designing high-density connectors that are not bulky is often a challenging task.

1. High density electrical connector

A high-density electrical connector is a connector with a large number of individual contacts such as PIN pins in a relatively small connector body. There is no obvious boundary between standard connectors and high-density connectors, but high-density connector naming is usually defined by having a greater number of contact points in the same housing size.

2. Strong demand for high-density electrical connectors

The increasing demand for high-density electrical connectors is driven by many factors, but especially the size, weight and functional requirements. Component size and weight have long been key factors in many military and aerospace applications, and due to the increasing popularity of portable and patient wearable devices, connectors are now becoming more important in the medical market.

By increasing the contact density of connectors, design engineers can improve performance while maintaining the same size and minimizing additional weight. Using a high-density contact design can also prevent standard power connectors from being too bloated and difficult to operate. Humanized operation is especially important for cooperating with highly demanding medical applications, such as patient monitoring and imaging equipment.

3. Medical application example: cardiac electrophysiology equipment

High-performance, medical applications of key equipment, such as cardiac electrophysiology equipment, are responsible for analyzing the electrical signals of the heart and diagnosing various types of arrhythmias, and also require high-density electrical connectors.

This arrhythmia is called AFibrilation, which is a normal heartbeat abnormality in the left atrium and / or right atrium (that is, the two upper chambers of the heart). AFib disrupts normal blood flow between the atrium and ventricle (the two lower chambers of the heart) and increases the risk of stroke by four to five times because it is more likely to form blood clots. In fact, AFib accounts for 15-20% of ischemic strokes caused by clot or fatty plaque deposition in blood vessels.

Due to the danger of this disease, patients need timely and accurate diagnosis and treatment. The most common diagnosis of AFib is that the doctor inserts a catheter into the heart's blood vessels. These catheters contain small, electrode-carrying wires that can be unfolded when they reach the atrium, contact with heart tissue, and draw an electrical pulse map to help the doctor identify the source of arrhythmia, and can be folded or contracted, and can be inserted and removed Wait.

In order to improve the time that electrophysiological catheters spend in these processes, medical device designers need to increase the number of catheter electrodes, usually two, three, four, or more. And high-density connectors are needed, and the size, weight, or flexibility of the device cannot be significantly increased.

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