Reconfigurable Point-of-Care Systems Designed with Interoperability Standards

Interoperability standards, if properly applied to medical system design, have the potential to decrease the cost of point-of-care monitoring systems while better matching systems to patient needs. This paper presents a brief editorial overview of future monitoring environments, followed by a short listing of smart-home and wearable-device efforts. This is followed by a summary of recent efforts in the Medical Component Design Laboratory at Kansas State University to address interoperability issues in point-of-care systems by incorporating the Bluetooth Host Controller Interface, the IEEE 1073 Medical Information Bus, and Health Level 7 (HL7) into a monitoring system that hosts wearable or nearby wireless devices. This wireless demonstration system includes a wearable electrocardiogram, wearable pulse oximeter, wearable data logger, weight scale, and LabVIEW base station. Data are exchanged between local and remote MySQL databases using the HL7 standard for medical information exchange.