Respiratory Devices

Looking to create a state-of-the-art medical device, this industry leader looked to ICS for assistance.

Lifesaving Medical Device Gets Real-Time Graphing Library from ICS

This privately held medical company, a leader in ventilation solutions for critically ill patients, was building a new life-critical device. They turned to Integrated Computer Solutions, Inc. (ICS) for a real-time graphing library that could be used in the touchscreen-based embedded application, as well as for strict compliance during development with the IEC 62304 international standard for medical device software.

Challenge

The library needed the capacity to implement three different types of graphs, as well as render multiple graphs in real time at a high frame rate — all while using minimal CPU resources. The Qt Charts module was not suitable for this application because it had a number of unique requirements including real-time display of data and support for touchscreen pinch zooming in the vertical and horizontal axes.

Solution

The ICS team determined the key to achieving these performance goals involved using OpenGL and leveraging the GPU hardware. The ICS team implemented it using Qt in C++ and QML, intending it to run on the device manufacturer’s custom Freescale i.MX6 ARM embedded board. The design incorporated several C++14 language features and was multi-threaded.

The scope of work included developing automated unit tests using Qt's unit test framework and measuring the test coverage achieved. To this end, the development team wrote code that was portable to embedded and desktop Linux, as well as Windows — a measure that allowed ICS to develop, debug, test, and demonstrate the new code on a desktop computer, as well as on the customer’s embedded platform.

Throughout development, ICS focused on complying with the IEC 62304 medical device software standard, which involved paying strict attention while writing design and test documentation, and adhering to the customer's coding standard.

Result

Pleased with the success of the initial project, the device manufacturer asked ICS to implement additional features in the graphing library. The customer also called upon ICS to execute a proof-of-concept to demonstrate the feasibility of running a key component of a new user interface on the manufacturer’s embedded platform.