SOA-BD: Service Oriented Architecture for Biomedical Devices

Introduction:

The communication of information systems with biomedical devices has become complex not only due to the existence of several private communication protocols, but also to the immutable way that software is embedded into these devices. In this sense, this paper proposes a service-oriented architecture to access biomedical devices as a way to abstract the mechanisms of writing and reading data from these devices, thus contributing to enable the focus of the development team of biomedical software to be intended for its functional requirements, i.e. business rules relevant to the problem domain.

Methods

The SOA-BD architecture consists of five main components: A Web Service for transport and conversion of the device data, Communication Protocols to access the devices, Data Parsers to preprocess data, a Device Repository to store data and transmitted information and Error handling, for error handling of these information. For the development of SOA-BD, technologies such as the XML language and the Java programming language were used. Besides, Software Engineering concepts such as Design Patterns were also used. For the validation of this work, data has been collected from vital sign monitors in an Intensive Care Unit using HL7 standards.

Results

The tests obtained a difference of about only 1 second in terms of response time with the use of SOA-BD.

Conclusion

SOA-BD achieves important results such as the reduction on the access protocol complexity, the opportunity for treating patients over long distances, allowing easier development of monitoring applications and interoperability with biomedical devices from diverse manufacturers.

Keywords
SOA-BD; Telehealth; Biomedical devices communication; Service Oriented Architecture; HL7; Intensive care unit