Medical Device Timestamp Alignment via Master Timing
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Solution Overview
Problem
In medical emergency situations, data collected from multiple devices often have misaligned timestamps due to internal device clock offsets and other errors, leading to challenges in combined analysis and effective treatment monitoring.
Innovation Solution
A system that aligns data timestamps across multiple medical devices by establishing wireless communication, broadcasting timing requests, and applying offsets to ensure synchronized data sets, using protocols like Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, or Zigbee, and storing timing correlations in a non-volatile data store for real-time or near real-time analysis.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Adaptability or versatility
If data is collected from multiple medical devices with independent internal clocks, then each device can operate autonomously and collect data independently, but timestamp alignment between devices becomes inaccurate due to clock offsets
Solution Approach 1:
A master timing device is introduced as an intermediary between multiple medical devices. Each device periodically queries the master timing device for synchronized time information, allowing all devices to maintain autonomous operation while achieving accurate timestamp alignment through the central time reference.
Solution Approach 2:
Time synchronization is established in advance before data collection begins. The master timing device distributes synchronized timestamps to all medical devices beforehand, ensuring that all devices start with aligned clocks and maintain accuracy throughout the data collection period.
2Ease of operation
If timestamps are not aligned across devices, then each device maintains simple independent operation, but combined analysis of data from multiple devices becomes difficult and inaccurate
Solution Approach 1:
The system implements a feedback mechanism where each medical device periodically queries the master timing device for current synchronized time information. This feedback loop ensures continuous timestamp alignment without complicating the operational simplicity of individual devices, enabling accurate combined analysis through properly synchronized timestamps.
3Duration of action of stationary object
If real-time data collection continues without timing synchronization, then data collection remains continuous and uninterrupted, but timing errors accumulate and worsen over time
Solution Approach 1:
The master timing device continuously provides synchronized time information to all medical devices throughout the data collection period. This continuous synchronization mechanism ensures that timing accuracy is maintained throughout extended data collection without interruption, preventing timestamp drift and accumulation of timing errors.
Data Source
AI summary
In an illustrative embodiment, systems and methods for aligning data timing of data sets collected by devices used at a medical scene may include a first device configured to establish wireless communication with at least a portion of the devices, and repeatedly, during treatment of a patient at the medical scene, receive a message including a current device time as determined by each device. The first device may determine a receipt time of the message and store a timing correlation based on the current device time, the receipt time, and a device identifier. Each timing correlation may be applied as an offset to timestamps of a corresponding data set, each data set collected by a respective device of the devices, to align timing of the data sets, thereby enabling combined analysis across the data sets.