Evaluation of error effects on a biomedical system

The evaluation of the reliability of a safety-critical system in the design phase is crucial as it allows to strengthen the weaknesses of products prior to the production phase, when the countermeasures could be expensive and/or ineffective. In some domains, it is common to adopt a design flow exploiting a high-level description of the system behavior and architecture from which the software, and eventually the hardware, can be automatically generated. In this paper we applied the concept to the design of a pacemaker. Starting from a high-level model, by exploiting automatic code generation, we derived the C code implementing the pacemaker functionality, then we evaluated its robustness against transient errors that may affect the computing resources used to execute the generated code. When compared to previous works that focused on reliability analysis of the pacemaker high-level model, only, this paper highlights the importance of considering both the high-level model, and the corresponding implementation in C code to allows for accurate and comprehensive reliability analysis.