A Component Based Framework to Enable Medical Devices Communication

Abstract

The interconnection of medical devices is emerging as a new requirement in modern medicine. The final goal of connecting heterogeneous medical devices in a wider network of computational servers is to monitor and improve patient safety, where it also constitutes a major goal in the Integrated Clinical Environment (ICE) framework. The heterogeneity of medical devices provided by different suppliers is a key challenge in ICE-based systems, where interoperability and data communication across devices is still under study and specification. ICE aims to create a standard interface that covers medical devices heterogeneity, hence, achieving interoperability in a safe way. It focuses on defining an interoperable bus between the patient, medical devices, software applications, and the clinician. Given the lack of realization of ICE standard, this paper presents a component-based framework for making ICE usable for medical applications. This work illustrates the component model in detail and validates it with a prototype implementation that focuses on the integration of heterogeneous medical devices as the most relevant requirements faced by ICE.