Medical Device Interoperability Framework

Abstract

Medical devices are pivotal in the modern healthcare services. The quality of service increases when the data from the devices are acquired seamlessly by Electronic Medical Record (EMR) systems. Ensuring Interoperability, seamless communication between medical devices and EMR systems, is a particularly challenging task because of heterogeneity in case of di erent device vendors and incompatible data formats. This thesis proposes a middleware to implement plug-n-play medical device communication for ensuring interoperability across a variety of medical devices. The middleware uses HL7 FHIR and ontology-based description of the devices and communication protocols to bridge the gap in heterogeneity. The proposed middleware acts as an intermediary for collecting native data from devices and generating HL7 compliant device observation reports. The representation of device observations in a standard form may become a recognizable product to the healthcare industry. The reliability of DIM is assessed using probabilistic model checking, i.e., a formal probabilistic analysis and evaluation approach. In particular, the PRISM model checker is used to analyze the Markov Decision Process (MDP) model to assess the failure and success probabilities of the overall system.