Integrating formal methods into medical software development : the ASM approach

Medical devices are safety-critical systems since their malfunctions can seriously compromise human safety. Correct operation of a medical device depends upon the controlling software, whose development should adhere to certification standards. However, these standards provide general descriptions of common software engineering activities without any indication regarding particular methods and techniques to assure safety and reliability. This paper discusses how to integrate the use of a formal approach into the current normative for the medical software development. The rigorous process is based on the Abstract State Machine (ASM) formal method, its refinement principle, and model analysis approaches the method supports. The hemodialysis machine case study is used to show how the ASM-based design process covers most of the engineering activities required by the related standards, and provides rigorous approaches for medical software validation and verification

Edge computing in IoT for smart healthcare

The rapid advances in the Internet of Things (IoT) and the increment of its users have opened a door to put into service IoT in healthcare, known as the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT), which consists of cloud, fog, and edge computing. IoMT has shown to be a flexible framework to remove traditional healthcare limits through utilizing technology/techniques and innovative digital devices to monitor patients’ conditions and to address medical service problems such as inaccuracy and long response time. It also could be helpful within critical and unexpected circumstances like epidemic diseases. Fortunately, some methods, including Edge Computing, were introduced to improve the healthcare system, make it more effective and solve problems. In this work, a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) was used to study Edge Computing solutions in healthcare, evaluate efficient therapeutic approaches, and demonstrate key factors that have not been considered in previous studies

Vérification de Modèle Probabiliste pour la Reconnaissance d'Activité Humaine dans les Jeux Sérieux Médicaux.

International audienceHuman activity recognition plays an important role especially in medical applications. This paper proposes a formal approach to model such activities, taking into account possible variations in human behavior. Starting from an activity description enriched with event occurrence probabilities, we translate it into a corresponding formal model based on discrete-time Markov chains (DTMCs). We use the PRISM framework and its model checking facilities to express and check interesting temporal logic properties concerning the dynamic evolution of activities. We illustrate our approach with the models of several serious games used by clinicians to monitor Alzheimer patients. We expect that such a modeling approach could provide new indications for interpreting patient performances. This paper addresses the definition of patient's models for three serious games and the suitability of this approach to check behavioral properties of medical interest. Indeed, this is a mandatory first step before clinical studies with patients playing these games. Our goal is to provide a new tool for doctors to evaluate patients.La reconnaissance d'activités humaines joue un rôle important en particulier dans les applications médicales. Cet article propose une approche formelle pour modéliser ces activités en prenant en compte les variations possibles du comportement humain. À partir d'une description de l'activité dans laquelle les probabilité associées aux évènements sont données, nous conceptualisons un modèle formel fondé sur les chaînes de Markov à temps discret. Nous utilisons l'environnement PRISM avec son système de vérification de modèles pour exprimer en logique temporelle et vérifier des propriétés intéressantes concernant l'évolution dynamique des activités. Nous illustrons notre approche avec plusieurs jeux sérieux utilisés par les cliniciens pour évaluer les patients Alzheimer. Nous espérons que cette approche de modélisation apporte de nouvelles indications dans l'interprétation des performances des patients. Cet article se concentre sur la définition des modèles de patients pour trois jeux sérieux ainsi que sur la pertinence d'une telle approche formelle pour vérifier des propriétés sur les comportements de patients ayant un intérêt médical. Il s'agit d'une étape préliminaire obligatoire avant de passer à une étude clinique où de vrais patients joueront à ces jeux. Notre but est de proposer un nouvel outil aux médecins pour évaluer leurs patients

A systematic literature review of the use of formal methods in medical software systems

The use of formal methods is often recommended to guarantee the provision of necessary ser-vices and to assess the correctness of critical properties, such as functional safety, cybersecurity,and reliability, in medical and health care devices. In the past, several formal and rigorous methodshave been proposed and consequently applied for trustworthy development of medical softwareand systems. In this paper, we perform a systematic literature review on the available state of theart in this domain. We collect the relevant literature on the use of formal methods for modeling,design, development, verification,andvalidationof software-intensivemedical systems. We applystandard systematic literature review techniques and run several queries in well-known reposito-ries to obtain information that can be useful for people who are either already working in this fieldor planning to start. Our study covers both quantitative and qualitative aspects of the subject