Medical device wireless adapter

Abstract

The invention relates generally to a medical device wireless adapter, and more particularly, to a module that adapts an existing legacy or newly designed medical device to a healthcare provider's wireless infrastructure.

Description

CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS [0001] This application claims priority from U.S. Provisional Patent Application Ser. No. 60 / 750,202, filed Dec. 14, 2005.FIELD OF THE INVENTION [0002] This invention relates generally to a medical device wireless adapter, and more particularly, to a module that adapts an existing legacy or newly designed medical device to a healthcare provider's wireless infrastructure. BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION [0003] A broad range of existing and newly developed medical devices have a need for wireless connectivity. Such medical devices range from complex medical instrumentation incorporating embedded computers, including patient diagnostic equipment and patient monitors, to so-called “dumb” instruments that are network-unaware, such as a simple electronic thermometer with a serial output port that might do little more than make one type of measurement and output digital data representing the measurement. [0004] The WiFi (Wireless-Fidelity) Alliance is an...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0029] More particularly, the invention includes a medical device wireless adapter comprising a radio section; one or more means for exchanging data between said adapter and said host device; one or more means for exchang...

Problems solved by technology

While adoption of these network standards has been widely viewed as successful and deployments are wide spread (including healthcare institutions), initial mechanisms provided by these standards for managing a secure network have been proven to be vulnerable.

However, commercial products that implement these standards rely on the host processor in a PDA, laptop or desktop computer to implement the computationally intensive Public Key portions of these standards.

When these products are applied to the types of Medical Devices introduced above, this places an enormous computational burden on a real-time processor that is generally not well suited to the task.

While chip manufacturers typically develop drivers and supplicants for common operating systems and microprocessors, these are generally not available for embedded platforms.

Porting this sizable set of functionality to a broad range of processors and real-time operating systems (RTOS) for a diverse set of medical devices presents a significant development and computational burden that impacts each of the products that need wireless connectivity.

While modern object oriented design practices do help alleviate the development burden, porting code is still a manual process.

Many of these legacy medical devices simply do not have the CPU or memory resources necessary to accommodate Public Key Cryptography.

In the case of a network-unaware medical instrument, there are likely no available computational resources within the medical device to assist in any aspect of wireless connectivity.

Configuring medical devices on a medical network, particularly if authentication is used, can be a daunting and time consuming process as every device must be manually configured.

Even if many clients use strong authentication and encrytion, when some client devices do not, unauthorized devices may access the network, leaving it vulnerable unless the network is careful designed.

Another problem in adding a network-unaware medical device to a medical network involves defining the instrument and its control and measurement parameters and presenting them in a meaningful way to the medical network.

Another problem in adding wireless connectivity to a medical device is power consumption.

WiFi products that have been developed for the laptop and general purpose computer market lack the power options needed for the typical modes of operation used by wireless medical devices and do not support the complexities of state of the art medical-grade wireless devices and networks.

Another problem with comm...

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