Medical Equipments Will Soon Interact Among Themselves

Ever since the Computer Age made its way into medicine, experts have dreamed of devising a way of letting medical equipments communicate among themselves, in a manner that would ensure a better healthcare quality for patients. Now, devices ranging from blood-pressure cuffs to heart-lung machines could easily be made to “talk” to each other, through a new software platform developed by experts at a Boston research group, Technology Review informs.

“The vision of fully interoperable medical devices has been around for at least a quarter-century, but lack of adequate standards and lack of manufacturers' desire to foster such integration has left us in a kind of Dark Ages,” Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) computer scientist Peter Szolovits says. He holds an appointment at the Harvard/MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, but was not involved in developing the new standards. According to the expert, these standards are “a critical component of making health-care information technology smarter, safer, and more efficient.”

One example given to highlight the importance of communication among medical devices is the case of heart-transplant surgery. After the heart-lung machine is disconnected from a patient's blood vessels, the ventilator needs to be turned on immediately, otherwise the patient risks permanent brain damage. But, at this point, not even the most complex and expensive machines know if the other one is turned on. The researchers compare the kind of dialog they are looking for with messages sent by a computer to a printer before and during the printing process.

The team's goal is to produce a platform that would allow the heart-lung machine to detect any malfunctions in the ventilator, and to continue to operate until the malfunction is fixed. This would provide a higher degree of certainty that the patient would not suffer any side-effects following the surgery. The new Integrated Clinical Environment (ICE) plan that the experts devised set the groundwork for a set of high-level design principles, which could be used as a foundation for building a network of machines capable of sustaining human life for longer in the future.