SetPoint Medical tackles autoimmune diseases with .NET Core 3 and Windows Presentation Foundation

The autoimmune problem

Every day, each of us carries out a personal war against the antigens that invade our body. For the most part, we win our battles because the human body is a complex marvel with a vast network of cells, tissues, and organs that work together to fight disease and keep us healthy. But sometimes the very systems that evolved to protect us can cause problems.

Autoimmune diseases occur when the immune system mistakenly destroys healthy tissues. According to the United States National Library of Medicine, these diseases affect about 8 percent of the US population—making them the third most common category of disease after cancer and heart disease.

It’s a global problem, and SetPoint Medical is addressing it with a cutting-edge solution. Using .NET Core 3 and Windows 10, SetPoint has developed a revolutionary bioelectronic platform that could provide a safer and more cost-effective treatment for autoimmune diseases.

An issue in need of novel solutions

A vast number of people with autoimmune diseases either don’t adequately respond to or are intolerant of prescribed pharmacological therapies. Furthermore, these therapies can have serious side effects and impose a significant financial burden on the health care system, costing tens of billions of dollars each year. That’s why SetPoint Medical is pioneering bioelectronic medicine—to fundamentally alter this treatment paradigm with a revolutionary implant that electrically stimulates the vagus nerve in the neck to restore the body’s immunological balance.

During development, SetPoint wanted to take advantage of the vast array of existing Windows capabilities and third-party applications, but it needed to communicate with its system via Bluetooth. Development of its own Bluetooth library on Windows would have required a lot of extra time and effort, and the system would also have to meet the rigorous regulatory standards required for implantable medical devices.

To simplify and accelerate development, speed time-to-market, and preserve existing interoperability with Windows 10 capabilities, the company adopted .NET Core 3.

Fast and easy migration

For almost a decade, SetPoint supported the development of its bioelectronic therapy with Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) applications and multiple third-party Win32 libraries. By moving to .NET Core 3, SetPoint was able to use its existing WPF applications and Win32 libraries alongside the latest Windows 10 and Universal Windows Platform (UWP) development features—including built-in Bluetooth capability—without having to rewrite its WPF applications. The switch took just two days and immediately simplified the development process.

“As an implantable medical device company, any component or software that we add to our stack creates a lot of documentation to meet regulatory compliance,” says Jacob Johnston, Principal Software Engineer at SetPoint Medical. “With .NET Core 3, we can trust the system’s reliability and security because it runs on Windows, and regulatory agencies like the FDA often accept that too. We basically get to inherit Microsoft validation efforts for free.”

More efficient and effective

With .NET Core 3, SetPoint improved its production process and accelerated development. “We’re using .NET Core 3 to help us eliminate the technical hurdles we had in the manufacturing process. The long-term impact will be significantly faster development,” says Tyler Thompson, Senior Software Engineer at SetPoint Medical.

And it’s not just the new development framework that’s speeding things along. By using the latest generation of Microsoft Surface devices, SetPoint is also bringing new levels of efficiency to its test stations.

“Our current qualification processes normally require lots of manual assembly procedures,” says Johnston. “With Surface devices running over Bluetooth, we just plug them in and we’re good to go. It saves us a lot of engineering and support time.”

A healthy future

SetPoint Medical plans to use .NET Core 3 to add further capabilities to its bioelectronic platform. It sees opportunity in using Microsoft machine learning libraries to help improve its treatment parameters as the platform is used in more studies and more data becomes available.

It’s a pivotal time for a company on the verge of transforming lives with potentially safer, more effective, and less costly treatment options. “What we’re doing is like being part of Google before it was big,” says Thompson. “Bioelectronic medicine has the potential to improve the lives of millions of patients with autoimmune conditions, and it’s incredibly exciting to be part of that.”

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