Modeling medical devices for plug-and-play interoperability

Abstract

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.