Integrating A GUI Into An Existing Medical Device

Roland Piquepaille writes "As I'm not quite familiar with medical devices, I was fascinated by this long article from Medical Electronics Manufacturing. It tells us that "new technology makes graphical user interfaces (GUIs) a fast and cost-effective way to add features and improve on existing designs" of these medical devices. And it really looks simple to use. You just need a standard PC and an HTML authoring tool to develop your GUI. It is then compiled in micro-HTML and embedded in silicon, leading to a graphical OS chip which doesn't need to be powerful or have tons of memory. "The GUI shipped with the Amulet Technologies starter kit, for example, contains almost half a megabit of information in HTML. When all of the gifs, widgets, and other files are imported and compiled into micro-HTML, the file size is reduced to a mere 66 Kb of memory." This overview contains more details and a photograph of such a GUI at work."

Comments

Actually, many do run MS OS's

[eericson]

You'd actually be suprised how many systems run Winnt or 98 as their OS. A good example are the Siemens Allegra series ultrasound systems (mid range, specializes in General Imaging, not cardio). They run WINNT as a backend with a custom app handling HW interaction. (Which is causing an interesting political battle with their Semi-Recent aquisition, and my old employer, Acuson. All of our systems ran a custom build of Linx OS as the OS with UI in X11.

Most of the MRI, CT, and PACS systems are built on industrial grade Unix OSs, but you'll still see a ton of MS around on the lower end devices.

Re:Who wrote this?

[Anonymous Coward]

It pretty much is. He's a nice guy too.

I'm working on a commercial product using Amulet Technologies' chip (really!), and it's very nice. The compiler could be a bit more verbose, and you could have a bit finer grained control over the functionality of the GUI module, but the rapid development and ease of coding are really quite good. You can whip together a GUI very, very quickly, using HTML and standard graphics files. There is a dizzying array of functionality available - wiping graphics such as the shown thermometer, line plots, numerical displays, all kinds of great stuff - all through a serial port and a simple protocol.

I know it's uncool to say good things about non-GPL'ed commercial companies jere (aside from Apple for some strange reason), but this is a very cool product for rapid development.

Re:Who wrote this?

[westendgirl]

I'm a marketing freelancer & consultant who frequently ghostwrites articles and success stories for companies. It's unlikely that the director of marketing wrote the article. More likely, a coordinator or specialist wrote it -- or they outsourced to a freelancer. So you're not even getting the goods from a senior manager. :)
In fact, even when you see an article with a byline that credits an engineer or other techie, there's a huge chance that someone in marketing wrote it. This doesn't mean that the article is garbage. It just means that they interviewed the techs and wrote it up. The tech people still have to sign off on it. When something that isn't true goes through, I find it's often because the techies weren't willing to take the time to read it through before signing off on it. Of course, I admit that sometimes the marketers go off on a Dilbert-style tangent. But that's often because no one takes the time to read their stuff before okaying it!
Still, I have to admit that Amulet took a bizarre step in crediting its marketing director. Usually, you could find *someone* in R&D to take the credit. ;)

Re:Damn, a real breakthrough!

[Stormie]

The article said 66Kb, not 66K. Half a megabit (512 kilobits) reduced to 66 kilobits.

html is for gui design only

[bigmo]

I have one of the units. The developers kit comes with a touch sensitive lcd screen. The "html" you write just makes buttons and things on the lcd for you to interact with.

When you "click" a button on the touch screen, a string of several bytes representing one of up to 255 commands is sent to whatever device you connect the amulet unit to. All the amulet does is convert a touch on the lcd screen to a number and send it out serially.

While it's certainly a nifty thing, and I actually have a use for it (custom control of some A/V gear), I think the whole thing is a little over hyped, not that we aren't used to that ...

ps - it's not just for medical devices. You can control your garbage disposal with it if you're so inclined.