Improving Medical System Design using a Multi-Discipline Development Environment

Overview

Modern medical systems have grown in complexity to accommodate ever-increasing demands for functionality and performance. Most medical systems now depend on combinations of hardware and software, and form elaborate mechatronic systems that both monitor and regulate patient health metrics.

Product designs must seamlessly integrate embedded and application software, analog and digital hardware, and mechanical components. Successfully integrating and verifying such complex systems is often costly in terms of time, money, and engineering resources. A multi-discipline development environment and concurrent design methodology provide continuity in system specification, design, implementation, verification, and validation.

This Web seminar describes a top-down, multi-discipline, concurrent design methodology that uses a hardware/software co-development environment to model, simulate, and analyze complex medical systems at multiple levels of design hierarchy. This virtual prototyping environment provides a structure for managing system complexity and ensuring design success. Models from different domains are integrated at each phase of the design flow, allowing system integration issues to be identified and addressed earlier, and helping to reduce overall program time and cost.

This seminar includes a brief cardiac pacemaker system demonstration, showing how a concurrent hardware/software design environment improves system development efficiency. Pacemaker hardware runs with C/C++-based software to control the patient’s heart rate, and with a real-time operating system and graphic engine to model interaction with a remote patient monitoring station.

Who Should View

• System design engineers responsible for defining complex function requirements
• System and electrical engineers responsible for electro-mechanical system specification and integration, particularly in rapid prototyping environments where return on tool investment is critical
• Engineering managers concerned about improving quality while reducing design-cycle time
• Engineers and managers involved in analog, digital, or mixed-signal system design
• Embedded C/C++ software developers working on complex multi-domain systems