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.
Medical and eHealth systems are progressively realized in the context of standardized architectures that support safety and ease the integration of the heterogeneous (and often proprietary) medical devices and sensors. The Integrated Clinical Environment (ICE) architecture appeared recently with the goal of becoming a common framework for defining the structure of the medical applications as concerns the safe integration of medical devices and sensors. ICE is simply a high level architecture that defines the functional blocks that should be part of a medical system to support interoperability. As a result, the underlying communication backbone is broadly undefined as concerns the enabling software technology (including the middleware) and associated algorithms that meet the ICE requirements of the flexible integration of medical devices and services. Supporting the on line composition of services in a medical system is also not part of ICE; however, supporting this behavior would enable flexible orchestration of functions (e.g., addition and/or removal of services and medical equipment) on the fly. iLandis one of the few software technologies that supports on line service composition and reconfiguration, ensuring time-bounded transitions across different service orchestrations; it supports the design, deployment and on line reconfiguration of applications, which this paper applies to service-based eHealth domains. This paper designs the integration between ICE architecture and iLand middleware to enhance the capabilities of ICE with on line service composition and the time-bounded reconfiguration of medical systems based on distributed services. A prototype implementation of a service-based eHealth system for the remote monitoring of patients is described; it validates the enhanced capacity of ICE to support dynamic reconfiguration of the application services. Results show that the temporal cost of the on line reconfiguration of the eHealth application is bounded, achieving a low overhead resulting from the addition of ICE compliance.
Communication middleware technologies are slowly being integrated also into critical domains that are also progresively transitioning to partitioned systems. Especially, avionics systems have transitioned from federated architectures to IMA (Integrated Modular Avionics) standard that targets partitioned systems to comply with the requirements of cost, safety, and weight. In the future developments, it is fully considered the integration of middleware to support data communication and application interoperability. As specified in FACE (Future Airborne Capability Environment), middleware will be integrated into mixed criticality systems to ease the development of portable components that can interoperate effectively. Still nowadays, in realtime environments, communication middleware is perceived as a source of unpredictability; and still there are very few contributions that present real applications of the integration of communication middleware into partitioned systems to support distribution. This paper describes the usage of a publish-subscribe middleware (precisely, DDS -Data Distribution Service for real-time systems-) into a fully distributed partitioned system. We explain the design of a reliable communication setting enabled by the middleware, and we exemplify it using a distributed monitoring application for an emulated partitioned system with the goal of obtaining the middleware communication overhead. Implementation results show stable communication times that can be integrated in the resource assignment to partitions.
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