WESH 2009

WESH 2009

December 7th, 2009       Eindhoven - The Netherlands organised and funded by ARTIST 

Programme

Programme

9:00 Boudewijn Haverkort
(Scientific Director, Embedded Systems Institute)
Opening
9:15 Pierre America
(Principal Scientist, Philips / Research Fellow, ESI)
Piërre van de Laar
(Research Fellow, ESI)
Healthcare in 2020: Consequences for Embedded Systems
9:45 Wim Pasman
(Chief Architect Imaging Systems, Philips Healthcare)
A (R)evolutionary Architecture for Philips Cardio Vascular
10:30 break
11:00 Elisabetta Farella
(PhD, DEIS - Università di Bologna)
Sensing and Actuating in Assistive Environments
11:45 René Roos
(Senior Firmware Engineer, Cochlear Benelux)
Cochlear Implant Systems: Today’s Challenges in Embedded Firmware Design
12:30 lunch break
14:00 Thom van Beek
(Researcher, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, TU Delft)
Capture User Requirements using Workflow Scenarios
14:45 Johan Henning
(Senior Systems Engineer, Nucletron)
How to Design Long Lasting Devices for a Fast Changing World
15:30 break
16:00 André Stollenwerk & Martin Lang
(Research Assistant, Embedded Software Laboratory, RWTH Aachen)
Embedded Contributions to an Intensive Care Safety Concept
16:45 Discussion Consequences for Future Research
17:30 Boudewijn Haverkort
(Scientific Director, Embedded Systems Institute)
Closing
18:00 dinner




Boudewijn Haverkort

Opening

Abstract
The Embedded Systems Institute is committed to extending knowledge about embedded systems. It has the explicit aim of making this knowledge publicly available.

This presentation gives an overview of the Embedded Systems Institute, the challenges on Embedded Systems and our way-of-working with academic and industrial partners. Further it gives an overview of our main projects with the Carrying Industrial Partners.

Slides


Pierre America & Piërre van de Laar

Healthcare in 2020: Consequences for Embedded Systems

Abstract
When determining research directions for embedded systems in healthcare it is important to have an idea of what the healthcare field will look like at the time that the research results end up in products, say around the year 2020. Therefore we first present the most relevant trends in society. Then we discuss the strategies that the major players in the healthcare field consider in dealing with these trends. These lead to certain characteristics for the embedded systems that will be deployed in that time-frame. From these, finally we can draw some conclusions for the research directions we might want to follow.

Slides


Wim Pasman

A (R)evolutionary Architecture for Philips Cardio Vascular

Abstract
One of Philips Healthcare’s largest units, Cardio Vascular (further referred to as ‘’Cardio Vascular’’), develops and manufactures professional products for the Healthcare market for minimal invasive medical procedures and open surgery. Today the market segments served are cardiology, neurology, radiology, electro physiology, and surgery. Yet there is not one single product serving all these markets. Consequently, Cardio Vascular has to release over 1 mln. product variations to meet market demands. To manage this complexity, a wide range of components exists, from which products for the various markets are assembled.

The current solution is not future proof. It is based on a software architecture developed for cardiology, as the requirements of the new markets (neurology, radiology, electro physiology, and surgery) were not known at the time. Consequently, it becomes more difficult to release efficiently new product variations. In addition, the market also wants integrated solutions; i.e. the architecture has to ensure that medical equipment provided by multiple suppliers work together seamlessly. Finally, cost-reduction dictates that the architecture has to support the outsourcing of parts to third parties.

This presentation gives a short introduction into Philips Cardio Vascular and outlines our gradual architectural transformation. Designing and realizing this new architecture from scratch is not an option. It would result in a loss of market share, as during the process no effort would be made to maintain and extend the current product portfolio. The presentation will also address our experiences with component-based designing of this architecture using ASD. We believe that this approach will help us in making correct designs that have a good test coverage and that can be maintained more easily over time. Finally, we wish to conclude by advocating a community for exchanging component-based design experiences.

Slides


Elisabetta Farella

Sensing and Actuating in Assistive Environments

Abstract
Body Area Networks and Assistive Environments are attracting increasing attention as an answer to cope with issues arising from an aging population, to address prevention and early risk detection, to support people with chronic diseases or as a stimulus to provide health consciousness of people and improve their quality of life. However, interaction with end-users and caregivers must be introduced from the design phase and maintained in all implementation steps for smart system to be effective and offer viable solutions to societal needs.
Experiences from EU projects in the field of motor assessment and rehabilitation, such as FP6 SENSACTIONAAL and FP7 SMILING, are presented as an occasion to reason on trends in technologies, application scenarios and user-centered design with specific reference to body sensor networks and smart devices for real-time feedback provisioning in motor rehabilitation and training.

Slides


René Roos

Cochlear Implant Systems: Today’s Challenges in Embedded Firmware Design

Abstract
Cochlear is world leader in implantable systems for hearing impaired people. The possible applications of such embedded systems are becoming more versatile, and at the same time, the capabilities of these systems are increasing rapidly. To support these factors, the importance of firmware is ever increasing.

Firmware allows more flexible system design as well as reusability of components between products and platforms. Due to the stringent requirements for these systems, the increased complexity of these heavily firmware based systems does however mean a great emphasis on quality aspects in general and regulatory in particular.

The presentation will focus on the main challenges that Cochlear is facing in embedded firmware design to support the growth and versatility of its systems.

Slides


Thom van Beek

Capture User Requirements using Workflow Scenarios

Abstract
Capturing user requirements in the early phase of a systems architecting project is not a trivial task. This approach uses a flowchart model of the expected operational use of the system to explicitly capture, discuss and develop the use related requirements for the system in natural language, from very early the design process (Project Preparation Phase).

In this presentation the different shapes, characteristics and benefits of the workflow models (flow chart, Gantt chart and 3D animations) are explained and demonstrated using a case study as an example and the benefits of these models, e.g. early phase user requirements documentation, hierarchical expanding model, customer feedback facilitation, explicit intra and extra design team communication/understanding are shown. The benefits for different stakeholders are explained. With stakeholders being the development organization as a whole, system architects, project design team third parties involved and the customer/user.

After requirements specification, the next step for the system architect is to translate the user requirements into system functionality. It is demonstrated how the workflow models provide a guide to develop a functional model of the system at the start of the conceptual design. By using the operational workflow as input to the function model creation process, an explicit relation between user requirements and system properties is obtained. In the framework of the systems engineering approach, these early defined workflow-functions relations between what the user wants and what the system should do can be used in the system verification phase to evaluate the system.

Slides


Johan Henning

How to Design Long Lasting Devices for a Fast Changing World

Abstract
Medical devices have a long time to market. The development and especially testing and certification are time consuming processes. Medical devices also have a long lifetime. In our business it is not uncommon that a device is in use for 10 to 15 years and sometimes even longer.
On the other hand the technical environment is changing very rapidly. Component obsolescence is an issue, maintenance of old software can become a problem. The challenge is how to deal with these conflicting issues.

Slides


André Stollenwerk & Martin Lang

Embedded Contributions to an Intensive Care Safety Concept

Abstract
In nowadays intensive medical care ARDS (acute respiratory distress syndrome) became one of the most problematic disease patterns. Mortality rate for ARDS is still between 40 and 60 percent.

A newer treatment option for this illness is the extracorporeal oxygenation. Here the patient is connected to an oxygenator. This device realizes a high percentage of the needed gas exchange with the blood outside the human body. The lung is disencumbered during this procedure in order to have a chance to regenerate faster.

The project SmartECLA emphasizes on enhancing the extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO). Therefore researchers out of four different faculties started improving the existing and clinically used setup. The overall aim is to optimize the used devices for the extracorporeal oxygenation according to the medical requirements and to develop a safety driven closed-loop control for this system. As a result the medical scientist shall no longer be forced to understand the internal details of the technical system in order to work with it; in fact the system shall present the important technical facts in combination with their medical impact to the medical.

The proposed system needs a high level of safety and reliability in order to be applicable to the intensive care routine. One keystone to this goal is the embedded safety concept. Each sensor and each actuator in the system is connected to a microcontroller. All these microcontrollers are connected through a CAN network. The basic need for these nodes arises from the varying structure of the interfaces to all devices in the system (e.g. RS232, I²C or just analog voltages). The microcontrollers act as translation units between the CAN network and the connected device.

Our proposed concept benefits of these distributed nodes which have all information available. This enables us to perform a diagnosis on selected parts of the systems by modeling the physical and chemical behavior which leads to a better fault prediction and an increased reliability of the overall system. Each node can evaluate the acquired information before transmitting it to the network and the other way round we are able to perform a more accurate sanity check for each control value set to an actuator with this setup. In addition to the small nodes we have one central node (dSpace micro auto box) — mainly in charge of performing the control algorithms and driving the human-computer-interface — which is performing a model-based diagnosis of more complex system components.

This project is supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG - Grant KO 1430/8-1).

Slides

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