Standardization of Acute Health Care Digital Communications

This project demonstrates the usefulness of a proposed plug and play communications standard (CANopen) for the medical device industry. A use case involving a hospital bed and an invasive blood pressure monitor (IBPM) was used for demonstration. Currently, IBPMs only measure a patient's blood pressure accurately if the patient's heart is at the same height as the monitor's air-fluid interface. Any change in height between the patient's heart and the monitor's transducer (air-fluid interface) will yield inaccurate blood pressure measurements. The solution corrects these inaccuracies by allowing devices to communicate relevant data to each other. This solution has been successfully developed in the CANopen application layer and a working prototype of the desired use case exists. This is the first use case of many that the investigators hope to implement, with the main goal of the project to inspire the need for a standardized communications network. The completion of this use case demonstrates the benefits of communication amongst different medical devices, and the team hopes that such a network will be employed in hospitals in the near future.