A publish-subscribe architecture and component-based programming model for medical device interoperability

Abstract

Medical devices historically have been monolithic units --- developed, validated, and approved by regulatory authorities as standalone entities. Modern medical devices increasingly incorporate connectivity mechanisms that offer the potential to stream device data into electronic health records, integrate information from multiple devices into single customizable displays, and coordinate the actions of groups of cooperating devices to realize "closed loop" scenarios and automate clinical workflows. In this paper, we describe a publish-subscribe architecture for medical device integration based on the Java Messaging Service. We provide a overview of a model-based development environment that we have built for rapidly programming device coordination scenarios. We assess the extent to which this framework is capable of supporting and complementing the Integrated Clinical Environment that has been proposed by the Medical Device Plug and Play Interoperability Project The implementation of this framework is freely available and open source. One of the primary goals of the framework is to provide researchers in acadaemia, industry, and government with an open test bed for exploring development, quality assurance, and regulatory issues related to medical device interoperability.