Abstract
This project aims to achieve key technology, infrastructure, and
regulatory science advances for next generation medical systems based
on the concept of medical application platforms (MAPs). A MAP is a
safety/security-critical real-time computing platform for: (a)
integrating heterogeneous devices and medical IT systems, (b) hosting
application programs ("apps") that provide medical utility through the
ability to both acquire information and update/control integrated
devices, IT systems, and displays. The project will develop formal
architectural and behavioral specification languages for defining
MAPs, with a focus on techniques that enable compositional reasoning
about MAP component interoperability and safety. These formal
languages will include an extensible property language to enable the
specification of real-time, quality-of-service, and attributes
specific to medical contexts that can be leveraged by code generation,
testing, and verification tools.
The project will work closely with a synergistic team of clinicians,
device industry partners, regulators, and medical device
interoperability and safety standard organizations to develop an open
source MAP innovation platform to enable key stakeholders within the
nation's health care ecosphere to identify, prototype, and evaluate
solutions to key technology and regulatory challenges that must be
overcome to develop a commodity market of regulated MAP components.
Because MAPs provide pre-built certified infrastructure and building
blocks for rapidly developing multi-device medical applications, this
research has the potential to usher in a new paradigm of medical
system that significantly increases the pace of innovation, lowers
development costs, enables new functionality by aggregating multiple
devices into a system of systems, and achieves greater system safety.
Performance Period: 10/01/2012 - 09/30/2015
Institution: University of Pennsylvania
Sponsor: National Science Foundation
Award Number: 1239324