Medical systems, the role of middleware and survey on middleware design

The integration of medical devices in the patient treatment process becomes increasingly important due to the efficiency of the technology. On the one hand, medical devices hardware is more powerful and its integration with the software platforms is improved. These devices are able to transfer accurate data to the clinician and offer the possibility of sharing data with other devices or computational servers for advanced analysis. On the other hand, medical software platforms are appearing to provide advanced functionality on top of these medical hardware devices. In this context, the role of the software is essential, not only at the highest abstraction level that provides the application business logic; the role of the underlying connecting software (the communication middleware or distribution software) is essential. These are capable of providing advanced connectivity functions, very efficiently, and within appropriate time bounds. This paper reviews the state of the art on middleware as facilitator for interconnection among devices and also describes a number of initiatives (such as the Integrated Clinical Environment -ICE) and projects that further extend the underlying distribution software towards the clinical domain as device interconnection facilitators.Comment: 15 pages, two figures, state of ar

Virtualization technology for distributed time sensitive domains

This paper reports on the state of the art of virtualization technology for both general purpose domains as well as real-time domains. There exits no entirely instantaneous data transmission/transfer. There always exist a delay while transmitting data, either in the processing or in the medium itself. However most systems are designed to function appropriately with a delay tolerance. This delay, inevitably, is affected when operating with an extra layer, the virtualization. For real time systems it is crucial to know the temporal limits in order not to surpass them. Introducing virtualization in the real-time domain therefore requires deeper analysis by making use of techniques that will offer results with deterministic execution times. The study of time in systems and its behaviour under various possible circumstances is hence a key for properly assessing this technology applied to both domains, especially the real-time domain