A proof of concept for medical device integration using Web Services

Since new technologies for therapy and diagnosis are emerging in the realm of medical engineering, the density of medical devices in the operating room or the intensive care units increases continuously. Although these devices could share medically relevant data or need to be aware of patient records, only few of them are actually connected to a network and exchange data with other devices or Health Information Systems. The goal of our research is to overcome this issue by using Service-Oriented Architectures. Therefore, we first reveal the benefits of interconnecting medical devices by determining several use cases. Afterwards we investigate requirements in terms of hardware and software. That is to say what type of hardware is deployed in modern medical devices, which physical communication interfaces are there and which operating systems and frameworks can be used. Afterwards we describe a prototype we built based upon real equipment and the Devices Profile for Web Services to show the feasibility of medical device communication in an interoperable and plug&play like manner.