Taxonomy of current medical devices for POCT applications and the potential acceptance of Bluetooth technology for secure interoperable applications

This paper presents a taxonomy for medical devices that includes the review of over 260 companies. The taxonomy classifies medical device products with respect to their output interface. Each medical device in the study is portable, designed for the point of care environment, non-implantable, and includes at least one output interface. The main motivation for this study is the possible resolution of current trends in medical device interfaces designed for point of care testing (POCT) scenarios. This paper also presents the Bluetooth Health Device Profile (HDP) as a possible option for current/new designs for POCT networks that use a smart phone as the main computational and communication engine. Vulnerabilities and countermeasures for current Bluetooth technology are described. The paper concludes by proposing a transitional solution involving the utilization of an interface box that supports the current legacy medical devices.