Category: Life Scope multi-parameter patient monitors product review. Clear and detailed explanation of the NIHON KOHDEN Life Scope Smart Cable design developed in the 1990s.
Smart things do not last |
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Smart
is
a magic word much touted in the market place; however, what was a latest smart
phone just months ago is no longer that smart today. What then can be said about a smart piece of cable that is more than twenty years old? Common sense tells us they should have been dumped long time ago. For this reason, we are curious to examine a line of
Smart Cables launched in August 1998 as accessories of a
medical patient monitor which are still on life support today; one must wonder the unusual reason for its longevity and where on the Product Life Cycle curve are these Smart cables?
The
Smart Cables are each marked with an identification digital hexadecimal code on its yellow plug to engage a similarly-colored yellow sockets known as MULTI-parameter (or MULTI) sockets.

The digital code is stored in an EEPROM chip mounted on a small flexible PC board electrically wired to the pins of the cable plug. The hexadecimal code in the EEPROM is inserted at the factory and not allowed to change after production. It is actually not difficult to make the Smart Cables but they are being priced highly by the manufacturer; only the common IBP cable can be sourced from China suppliers at a reasonable price.
Back in the 1990s, NIHON KHODEN identified five types of analog hardware that can be linked from the inside onto the flexible MULTI-parameter sockets and to make use of these internal hardware, an external cable with the correct digital code on its plug must be inserted into one of the MULTI-parameter sockets. These cables with coded plugs are collectively cited as Smart Cables by the manufacturer and the codes are also known as parameter codes. Each
MULTI-parameter socket selects only one channel of the internal
hardware, except for Temperature allowing two channels of hardware to be
selected.
To reiterate, the hardware mentioned here (Temperature, IBP, Cardiac Output, Thermistor Respiration and FiO2) are linked to the yellow flexible socket internally, and not from the outside |
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An
external measurement cable with a correct digital code in its plug can
make use of any of the internally configured hardware shown here |