Modeling medical devices for plug-and-play interoperability

One of the challenges faced by clinical engineers is to support the connectivity and interoperability of medical-electrical point-of-care devices. A system that could enable plug-and-play connectivity and interoperability for medical devices would improve patient safety, save hospitals time and money, and provide data for electronic medical records. However, existing medical device connectivity standards, such as IEEE 11073, have not been widely adopted by medical device manufacturers. This lack of adoption is likely due to the complexity of the existing standards and their poor support for legacy devices. We attempted to design a simpler, more flexible standard for an integrated clinical environment manager. Our standard, called the ICEMAN standard, provides a meta-model for describing medical devices and a communication protocol to enable plug-and-play connectivity for compliant devices. To demonstrate the capabilities of ICEMAN standard, we implemented a service-oriented system that can pair application requirements with device capabilities, based on the ICEMAN device meta-model. This system enables medical devices to interoperate with the manager in a driverless fashion. The system was tested using simulated medical devices.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2007

Author dc:creator

• Hofmann, Robert Matthew

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Peter Szolovits and William W. Weinstein.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/41636

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/41636