Medical instrument data exchange

Abstract

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.

Interoperable Medical Instrument Networking and Access System with Security Considerations for Critical Care

“…MediCAN™ technology suite creates the interfacing hardware and related communication protocol in an open standard fashion for instruments to network in any healthcare environment. MediCAN™ system works towards a similar goal as ISO/IEEE 11073 [33,34,35] in being a candidate to become an open standard. MediCAN™ addresses communication services and protocol definitions based on Control Area Network (CAN) communication.…”

“In the same Boat” – Considerations on the Partnership between Healthcare Providers and Manufacturers of Health IT Products and Medical Devices

“…This applies to both, intra-institutional and cross-institutional integration approaches. The intra-institutional approaches integrate medical devices into clinical networks and applications in order to complement electronic patient records, streamline workflows and avoid disruptions [7,8] while cross-institutional initiatives support integrating, for example, Personal or Electronic Health Records (PHR, EHR) with home monitoring solutions and sensor devices as well as AAL solutions (ambient assisted living) [10,11,12]. This is reflected on the organizational side by an increasing number of hospitals that are either combining the IT and ME departments or at least fostering cooperation between those units.…”

Low-power secure body area network for vital sensors toward IEEE802.15.6

“…The S-BAN is also expected to configure many sensors automatically in it and simple setup an interface for users. We begin this paper by the S-BAN MAC protocol, logical 1 M. Kuroda is with National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, 4-2-1 Nukui-Kitamachi, Koganei, Tokyo,184-8795 Japan (e-mail: marsh@nict.go.jp) 2 S. Qiu is with Dairix Corporation, 1-10-2 Isago, Kawasaki-ku, Kawasaki, 210-0006 Japan (e-mail: shuye.qiu@dairix-net.co.jp) 3 O. Tochikubo is with Graduate School of Medicine, Yokohama City University, 3-9 Fukuura, Kanazawa-ku, Yokohama, 236-004 Japan (e-mail: tocchi@med.yokohama-cu.ac.jp) channel assignment, MAC frame, and application data representation. We then discuss less-power consumption for time synchronization between an S-BAN management node, called as a coordinator and sensors having different timer precision in hardware.…”

“…Common network interfaces are also not provided in the devices. There are standardization activities, such as Medical Devices WG in Bluetooth SIG [1] and point-of-care medical device communications in the ISO/IEEE 11073 [2]; however, these standards are not targeted for small vital sensors, but for medical/healthcare equipments in hospitals/at home. This paper discusses and evaluates a secure body area network (S-BAN) optimized for small vital sensors.…”