Challenges in Medical CPS
Modern techniques for treating patients are very dependent on medical devices. Â Medical devices include sensors, which provide vital information about patient state; actuators that effect treatment; and decision support systems that help clinical personnel in planning the treatment. Â Increasingly, devices used in treating a patient are interconnected, forming a patient-centric cyber-physical system (CPS). Â Medical CPS hold out the promise of improved patient care with fewer opportunities for human error and decreased treatment costs. Â In particular, medical CPS enable the development of physiologically closed-loop approaches that automatically deploy safety measures in response to changes in the patient's condition. Â At the same time, deployment of such medical CPS presents a variety of challenges. Â This lecture will discuss design, deployment, and regulatory challenges and suggest possible ways to overcome then, motivated by several on-going projects at the University of Pennsylvania. Â We will start with safety considerations for individual devices, such as infusion pumps and pacemakers; explore the implications of interoperability in collections of medical devices used in a treatment of a patient; and finally consider some of the clinical applications that are enabled by interconnecting medical devices.