Advances in medical devices and health care has been phenomenal during the recent years. Although medical device manufacturers have been improving their instruments, network connection of these instruments still rely on proprietary technologies. Even if the interface has been provided by the manufacturer (e.g., RS-232, USB, or Ethernet coupled with a proprietary API), there is no widely-accepted uniform data model to access data of various bedside instruments. There is a need for a common standard which allows for internetworking with the medical devices from different manufacturers. ISO/IEEE 11073 (X73) is a standard attempting to unify the interfaces of all medical devices. X73 defines a client access mechanism that would be implemented into the communication controllers (residing between an instrument and the network) in order to access/network patient data. On the other hand, MediCAN technology suite has been demonstrated with various medical instruments to achieve interfacing and networking with a similar goal in its open standardization approach. However, it provides a more generic definition for medical data to achieve flexibility for networking and client access mechanisms. In this paper, a comparison between the data model of X73 and MediCAN will be presented to encourage interoperability demonstrations of medical instruments.
Medical device manufacturers continuously improve instruments with more capabilities at the point of care such as the bedside, operating room, intensive care unit, or emergency room. The instruments are in turn becoming more sophisticated; however, the operation of an instrument is still expected to be locally done by authorized medical personnel. The measurements from these instruments are stored using archaic methods such as a patient history record on a paper. The access to these records is cumbersome and not available unless the medical personnel is present at the point of care. Unfortunately, each medical instrument has its unique proprietary API (application programming interface - if any) to provide automated and electronic access to monitoring data. Integration of these APIs requires an agreement with the manufacturers towards realization of interoperable health care networking. As long as the interoperability of instruments with a network is not possible, ubiquitous access to patient status is limited only to manual entry based systems. Manual entry is being implemented to create electronic health records, HL7, and similar initiatives. However, they do not address a bottomup automation (i.e. from instrument and patient bed side up) to leverage the mature networking technologies in a health care setting. This paper demonstrates an attempt to realize an interoperable medical instrument interface for networking using MediCAN technology suite as an open standard. We will present the approach with a comparison study of a similar initiative led by ISO/IEEE 11073 standards.
Sensor networks pose unique challenges for network management that make the traditional network management techniques impractical. Mature internet technologies such as the Simple Network Management Protocol can be utilized to identify sensors as mere network elements to achieve better data transfer architectures. Network management principles can be utilized to integrate configuration, performance, fault, security, and accounting into a sensor network, all of which are relevant features desirable in an instrumentation and measurement system. Sensor networks up to date have evolved in a category of their own in terms of how measurement data would be transmitted and how sensor nodes would be identified. Embedded systems have enabled advanced functionalities even in the smallest nodes. Hence, the capabilities of an actual internet node in terms of addressing and communication protocols are now realizable for a typical sensor node. This paper is on design of a management information base that would identify and help configure measurements on such a sensor node in a sensor network. The proposed design delivers a scalable and simple network management and configuration methodology for all types of sensor networks.
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