Rabbits are good for your health! Just ask Dennis Rieger, president of Advanced Medical Information Technologies (AdMIT), Inc., makers of the Sentinel universal data acquisition and management system. With a little help from Rabbit Semiconductor, the Sentinel is giving healthcare professionals unprecedented instant access to vital patient and clinical information, resulting in better treatment decisions and increased efficiency in record keeping and accounting.
Rieger and his design team chose the Rabbit 2000 microprocessor to help the Sentinel system meet demanding connectivity challenges in the infinitely complex world of medical devices. The powerful 8-bit Rabbit processor is called upon to drive the system Ethernet Intelligent Device Connectors (EIDCs), which enable "plug-and-play" connections from virtually any serial medical device to a sophisticated embedded relational database.
"The Sentinel technology provides real-time data acquisition directly from medical monitoring or testing devices right at the patient bedside," says Rieger. "With the TCP/IP capabilities of the Rabbit processor, data from any device—whether it is a monitor, IV pump, or blood analyzer—can be accessed anywhere over a wide area network through the EIDC, which is directly connected to the device." In other words, specialists can be consulted, treatment records accessed, and drug interaction databases queried—all in the blink of an eye.
Data Breakthrough
Termed a breakthrough in what is called point-of-care connectivity, the Sentinel system dramatically improves healthcare decision-making, while at the same time saving medical administrators time and money.
Marketed to OEMs in the medical technology field, the Sentinel system intelligently consolidates any number of clinical or laboratory instruments into a single data management server, reformats the information into a standard medical data format, and then interfaces the data directly with laboratory, hospital, or clinical information systems.
"The Ethernet Intelligent Device Connector automatically identifies the medical instrument as soon as it is connected," says Rieger. "Test result, patient, or quality control information is automatically captured, consolidated, and transferred to the Sentinel system for processing, storage, and reporting."
All of this information is instantly available to caregivers and laboratory staff anywhere via LAN, WAN, dial-up, or wireless connections.
In hospitals or health care facilities that do things the old way, data is generally read off the monitor by a clinician or test device and then copied onto paper. Later, it is transferred into a computer system for clinical or billing purposes. "This causes substantial delays in providing the doctor with the necessary data to help make an informed decision on patient care," says Rieger. "It also delays billing, which has a major impact on the hospital operations, increasing costs."
With the Sentinel system, what took hours, days, or weeks now takes only seconds or minutes, leading to better patient care at lower cost.
Rabbit-Quick Connectivity The Sentinel system Ethernet capabilities facilitate lightning-quick wide-area network communications in various medical settings—from doctor offices, hospitals, and clinics to nursing homes and home care environments. "Let us say we have multiple blood draw centers throughout a city, and they want to put a specialized set of blood analyzers at each site, but they want to have all the data come back to their central laboratory and have one guy, a central lab manager, be in control of all of that data," says Rieger. " With our system—and the Rabbit-powered EIDCs—they can do that. All they have to do is take our connector on the serial side, plug it into the blood analyzer, and the other side plugs into the network."
The primary components of the EIDC are the Rabbit 2000 processor, a RealTek Ethernet chip, RJ-45 connector, serial transceiver, DB9 connector, interfaced Flash and SRAM to run substantial custom code, and additional support circuitry to gain UL/CUL, FCC, and CE certification.
"A combination of things sold us on the Rabbit processor," says Rieger. "First, it is a chip with several built-in functions—a system on a chip, if you will. The serial ports are on it, which was important to us, as well as some other peripherals. Next, cost was important because, quite frankly, we are competing with larger-scale corporations. So we had to be extremely aggressive on price. Another key consideration was the development environment. With the Rabbit, we were looking at something that has a complete set of development tools, like the Dynamic C¨ software, its built-in libraries and, in particular, the royalty-free TCP/IP stack. And then the final thing, because we had a couple of different people working on the product, were the low-cost development kits."
Development time with the Rabbit was minimal, enabling Rieger team to reduce its initial time-to-market projections. "We think using the Rabbit shaved off four to five months of development time," he says. "Providing that stack and the tools was the most helpful factor—the combination of the tools and the overall cost allowed us to move forward much quicker."
By "getting there quicker" on the initial design, engineers had more time to take advantage of the Rabbit design flexibility and install unique software features to accommodate the infinite number of medical devices and protocols.
"There are a lot of issues in a hospital where there might be hundreds, if not thousands, of users and devices," says Rieger. "Network traffic is pretty intense, and there is a lot of quirky stuff about how all these devices are handled. So we often have to install custom features to control this. Fortunately, the Rabbit flexibility and development environment allow us to rapidly go in there and put in special functions. A lot of our ability to handle all these different medical devices is built into the software on the Rabbit."
Fit for Life
The Rabbit 2000 is proving a perfect fit for a Sentinel data acquisition system that considers operational elasticity its forte. "With most data acquisition systems, operating parameters are pre-established: You set up the connection, access an operator interface that tells you what kind of device you have on each port, and so on," says Rieger. "Well, in our environment, you can not do that—there could be any number of devices hung off one patient, and they could be changing constantly. There is no operator interface—you just plug in any number of devices with unique serial protocols and run them all concurrently. The system figures out on the fly who it is, loads the right software, changes the protocol, and just starts talking and pulling data off instantly."
Perhaps the main benefit of the Sentinel system is its ability to provide a complete, universal data acquisition system that allows any serial device to be plug-and-play. "This is more important for medical than anywhere else," says Rieger, "because when you have a patient in crisis, you need to be able to instantly send, process, and receive data."