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?

[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. ;)