Interface Box for Medical Infusion Pump
| Company | Arcomed, Regensdorf, Switzerland |
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Product |
Today's medical infusion pumps in hospitals are mainly used as stand alone systems. A long series of manual processing steps is required from the doctor's drug prescription to the actual medication. Each of these steps is error-prone and can potentially endanger the patient's life, e.g. if infusion bags get mixed up during this process and wrong medication is provided. To avoid as many manipulation errors as possible, Arcomed has developed a system that allows the monitoring of the entire procedure. This system connects the doctor PC, the pharmacy PC and the infusion pump at the patient by means of the hospital network.
The Unique Box is a network enabled microprocessor system that is directly placed with the infusion pumps. It acts as a gateway between the infrared port of the pumps and a conventional Ethernet network. The Unique Box also includes a bar code scanner used to identify the patient's ID and the ID tags on each drug (syringe or infusion bag). The system is therefore able to verify whether a drug is placed in the correct pump. Additionally, the pump's parameters can be configured automatically since the prescription can be requested through the network. The network interface can also be used to receive patient data or to monitor the infusion process. The Unique Box can even be used in non-hospital environment, such as home care. For this application, the Ethernet interface is replaced by a dial-up connection over a GSM/GPRS modem. A key feature of the entire system is the communication security: Unique Box has to be immune to denial of service attacks, must block unauthorized access, and the communication channel needs to be encrypted so that sniffing is impossible. |
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Duration |
18 months for development and medical CE certification, |
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