Development of A Tablet-based Ultrasound System

This is a portable ultrasound system that produces high resolution images. The miniaturized ultrasound system runs on the tablet computer (see Fig. 1) under the Windows 7 Touch interface, for multi-touch operation. Users can also connect the tablet to a printer or  for image output. To fulfill the diverse needs of mobile computing, the tablet can also be used on the dock (see Fig. 2 & Fig. 3), on the go, fixed onto a wall, or outputted to an HDMI-enabled TV or monitor. As the lead designer, Yu-Hsiu Lee is responsible for the mechanical design of the medical tablet with a built-in ultrasound engine.

Fig. 1 Schematic drawing of the tablet-based ultrasound system

Tolerance Design

In mass production, it is common practice to consider the trade-off between assembly tolerance/quality and manufacturing capability/cost (see Fig. 1). The concept of tolerance design help assigning appropriate tolerance values with reasonable manufacturing cost meanwhile achieving the desired overall performance. This tool is also useful to analyze function anomaly and re-adjust origianl tolerance values.

 Fig. 1 Schematic drawing of trade-off between cost and performance