engineering the
embedded world

IEEE 11073 SDC

Seamless Connectivity of Medical Devices

In the IT world, standards such as USB and HDMI have long formed the basis for seamless communication. The IEEE 11073 standard is currently developing rapidly as the basis for cross-manufacturer networking of medical devices. International dissemination is ensured through the integration of the IEEE and the IHE.

It goes without saying that these products must meet the highest functional safety and cybersecurity requirements. Ethernet-based communication and a service-oriented architecture (SOA) with established security elements were therefore used in the design.

 

Use Cases based on SDC

SDC is an enabler for various use cases, particularly in the OR and intensive care units, a small selection of which is shown below:

Silent ICU

In intensive care units, up to 350 medically irrelevant acoustic alarms are triggered per patient per day, causing distress to patients and medical staff. With SDC, alarms can be suppressed locally and distributed effectively via an alarm management system. This eliminates local background noise and allows staff to act according to medical priorities.

Quarantine station

Entering quarantine stations requires time-consuming changing procedures, poses a risk of infection for medical staff and generates large amounts of waste from protective clothing. With SDC, it is possible to transfer the most important information about the patient's health status to the safe area and adjust device settings remotely.

Documentation

The law requires various device settings to be logged at short intervals, which is error-prone and labor-intensive. With SDC, these device settings can be stored reliably and fully automatically in the databases such as PDMS and HIS.

Quality assurance

Many time-consuming quality assurance measures for operations can only be carried out after the operation and therefore have no effect on the surgical outcome. SDC is the enabler for quality assurance in real time and avoids treatment errors.

 

Status of Standardisation

After “SDC Cathedral Window (Version 2)”, Martin Kasparick and Björn Andersen, Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode

 

Technical Overview

Roles

The SDC standard defines the roles of service providers and service consumers. Typical examples of providers are ventilators and infusion pumps. Typical examples of consumers are devices with an HMI such as patient monitors and video displays. The standard provides for multi-consumer capability for providers and multi-provider capability for consumers.

Functionality

The application-relevant data is written by the providers to a memory area called the “Medical Data Information Base” (MDIB) and written from there to the MDIB of the higher-level consumer. In this context, one also speaks of digital twins. The data is available in a structured form with its description.

Range of functions

SDC offers such a wide range of functions that all the use cases discussed so far have been easy to implement. Get, set and subscribe methods are available.

Activities

Since 2019, embeX has been involved in the dissemination of SDC - initially through collaboration in the BMBF-funded PoCSpec project.

In a strategic collaboration, embeX is developing a particularly powerful and comprehensive SDC stack in accordance with IEEE 11073 exclusively for Vector Informatik GmbH. This is characterised, among other things, by the fact that it supports the original XML format as well as the modern gRPC.

Stacks are integrated into the medical products of well-known manufacturers until they are ready for approval, taking into account all safety and security requirements.

 

Who to contact

Dr. Kai Borgwarth

Head of Business Unit Medical Engineering
Marketing and Sales

Fon:    +49 761 479799-677
Mobile: +49 151 4223 2542
kai.borgwarth(at)embeX.de

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Contact

Tel.: +49 761 479799-677
kai.borgwarth(at)embeX.de