A novel approach for remote diagnosis and troubleshooting for lab instruments

The use of remote diagnosis and troubleshooting are widely used nowadays to improve instruments' uptime and minimize workflow interruption. However, such feature is not used in many critical care units and/or laboratories either due to limited capabilities and access offered by manufacturers of such equipment or because of high cost for interface software packages especially for developing countries. The negative impact is more felt in laboratories with old instruments lacking remote connection ports but having an embedded maintenance and/or troubleshooting software. This paper describes a direct access remote diagnosis and troubleshooting for the input and output devices of a critical care and laboratory instrument using a flat data cable, an 8 cm × 10 cm built-in printed circuit board designed for this purpose, a standard parallel cable, and a control software. The main advantage of this approach is its low cost, compact design and simple implementation besides being convenient and suitable for other instruments possessing input/output devices with the same specifications. Implementation of the software and hardware related to accessing the instrument's membrane keypad and display using a PC has been successfully accomplished and tested leading to the use of all PC communication capabilities including remote connection and access. By integrating all hardware components, the prototype system was capable of remotely diagnosing and controlling the instrument on real-time basis.