An ICE Compliant Component Model for Medical Systems Development

There is a trend in developing computer systems for remote patient monitoring both at their own homes and also at specilized medical centers such as hospitals. This saves costs in patient care and also allows a closer monitorization of the vital signals under the supervision of a reduced number of medical staff. Medical systems have to comply with strict safety regulations and standards, to meet such requirements, the involved actors currently gather around ICE (Integrated Clinical Environment) specification. ICE is a promising solution to integrate heterogeneous sensors, devices, and processing computers into safe medical systems. It supports the interoperability of systems, safe data transmission from the patient's location to the clinician site to provide the appropriate treatment in a timely way. The paper presents a component model that aims at being ICE compliant, to support the design and development of distributed ICE-based systems for MD (Medical Devices) integration. It better supports understanding ICE requirements on monitoring applications from several points of view: the inherent distributed nature, high acuity, criticality, device heterogeneity, and timing requirements. The proposed work does not only focuses on the software architecture at component level, but it vertically validates it, we exemplify the component model through a prototype implementation of a patient monitoring system. The achieved design is modular, flexible, reflects the temporal requirements of medical applications, and can be easily integrated with external systems.