Dynamic remote control through service orchestration of point-of-care and surgical devices based on IEEE 11073 SDC

Nowadays, the staff of modern operation rooms (ORs) and intensive care units (ICUs) has to handle increasingly complex medical devices and their user interfaces. Inconsistent and often non-sterile user interfaces lead to error-prone and slow reconfiguring actions which in the end may even harm the patient. To overcome these issues interconnected medical devices are necessary. We introduce a new concept for flexible and easy-to-use remote controls which allow to control a range of different devices from different manufacturers. Current solutions are vendor-, and mostly even device-specific and tightly coupled. The effort for manufacturers is high and the maintainability is bad. Thus, controls that can be assigned dynamically to different medical devices are rare or mostly not available. Yet such dynamic controls are badly needed to improve clinical workflows especially in ORs and ICUs. We establish such a remote control setup using the service-oriented architecture defined in the IEEE 11073 SDC standards family. The presented concept is based on dynamic service orchestration to overcome existing problems: The control device and the controlled medical device are published as independent services in the network and an additional composed service interconnects them. We successfully implemented this concept for dynamically assignable controls in a real-world demonstrator with several medical devices from more than five different manufacturers. Performance evaluations show its practicability.