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Integrating A GUI Into An Existing Medical Device

Posted by Hemos on from the build-it-from-the-bottom-up dept.

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."

6 of 129 comments (clear)

  1. Who wrote this? by JoshuaDFranklin · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Jim Todd is director of sales and marketing for Amulet Technologies

    Makes you wonder if any of it is true.

  2. Slight problem with the compression by heironymouscoward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    From "almost half a megabit" to 66kb?

    500,000 bits is 62,500 bytes.

    I hope they meant 0.5 megabytes.

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  3. Cannot avoid thinking of Therac by EggSausageBaconAndSp · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I cannot read such an article without thinking of the Therac-25 catastrophe (several people being killed or severely injured because of a poorly designed X-ray device).

    My 2 cents: When developing a medical device, don't focus on a nice'n'cool UI, but on safety.

    1. Re:Cannot avoid thinking of Therac by nickd · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Safety does also include making it easy and intuitive for people to use it so that they can operate it safely..

  4. standardised medical embedded gui by joshwa · · Score: 3, Insightful

    ok, why is this special? it's a standardised embedded gui for medical systems. you know, like the ones offered by half a dozen other companies (symbian, qnx, etc)

    I guess it's because you get to code in html instead of C. Great, so now you can hire a TOTAL idiot html jockey to design your life-and-death medical interface instead of a (slightly-) better-trained C programmer?

    Whoop tee doo.

  5. Re:Code blue (screeen of death) by niko9 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This could give a whole new meaning to the blue screen of death. I sure hope they're not using Winbloze on a critical piece of life support.

    I don't think the OS is the major issue. Poor GUI designs in all types of devices are rampant.

    From my experience, the Lifepak 12 Defibrillator leaves alot to be desired as far as the user interface is concerned. It's nice to have fancy GUI (oohh shiny things!), but if it's clunky in it's excecution and you have to spend 30 seconds to do simple things like synchronized cardioversion then....

    I would love to see and Apple desgined defibrillator. It would probably only have 4 buttons and you could work any function in less than 5 seconds.

    Medics can dream, can't they?

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