Toward safe interoperations in network connected medical cyber-physical systems using open-loop safe protocols

Abstract

Using wireless networks in medical Cyber-Physical Systems could be challenging. Because the medical system not only assists the medical personnel to deliver medical services to the patient but also needs to deal with accidental situations such as communication failures without compromising the patient's safety. Previous research work tackled the communication failure problems in medical CPS from architecture perspectives. However, as medical devices configurations become more complex when a medical CPS is composed of many medical devices, we need to know that whether the certain configuration and a combination of the devices will not compromise the patient's safety. We present an algorithm to tackle the problem that whether a given system configuration exists a possible series of system transitions that allows the physicians to perform medical operations; in the mean time, the system transitions ensure the patient's safety while communication failures may happen during the transitions.