A DPWS-Based Architecture for Medical Device Interoperability

Abstract

Due to the fact that mature or upcoming standards like the ISO/IEEE 11073 are not adopted widely by medical device vendors lack of interoperability between medical devices is still an issue. We propose an architecture for medical device interoperability basically built on the Device Profile for Web services (DPWS) for syntactic interoperability. Mature data communication standards like the domain information model of ISO/IEEE 11073 or HL7 could be used for semantic interoperability. DPWS facilitates interoperability by providing Web service based standards for dynamic device discovery and event propagation. Additional Web service standards are used for interface description, messaging, as well as for secure information transmission. Because of the use of Web service technologies a wide range of tools can be used for implementation. The architecture is designed for usage on resource-constraint devices as well as on PC’s. Furthermore, the before mentioned technologies are also capable for low latency communication.