A Medical Device Safety Supervision over Wireless

Interoperability of medical devices is a growing need in modern healthcare systems, not just for convenience, but also to preclude potential human errors during medical procedures. Caregivers, as end users, strongly prefer the use of wireless networks for such interconnections between clinical devices due to its seamless connectivity and ease of use/maintenance. In [KSM10], we introduced a Network-Aware Safety Supervisior framework to integrate medical devices into clinical supervisory systems using finite state machine (FSM). In this paper, we simplify FSM into Boolean Logic to minimize safety logic overhead and introduce a generic method, called pre-verified safety control (PVSC) framework to integrate medical devices into clinical management systems using wireless technologies that have their safety properties verified in a formal manner. Our method provides (i) a PVSC safety layer that automatically generates the safety engine to guarantee given safety requirements and (ii) an abstracted application development environment so that applications can be developed independent of underlying complications of wireless communication. To mitigate negative effects due to packet losses, the PVSC framework employs a pipelined “pre-planning” of the device controls. The key motivation of the work in this paper is to preserve safety and the application development environment, as is, even after adding unreliable communication media, such as wireless, along with a pre-planning mechanism.