A low complexity coordination architecture for networked supervisory medical systems

Cooperating medical devices, envisioned by Integrated Clinical Environment (ICE) of Medical Device Plug-and-Play (MDPnP), is expected to improve the safety and the quality of patient care. To ensure safety, the cooperating medical devices must be thoroughly verified and tested. However, concurrent control of devices without proper coordination poses a significant challenge for the verification of the safety, since complex interaction patterns between devices might cause the explosion of the verification state space. In this paper, we propose a low-complexity coordination architecture and protocol for networked supervisory medical systems. The proposed architecture organizes the systems in a hierarchical and organ-based manner in accordance to human physiology and home-ostasis. Further, the proposed protocol avoids potential conflicts and unsafe controls, while allowing efficient concurrent operations of medical devices. The evaluation results show that our approach reduce the complexity by several orders of magnitude.