Intelligent medical device integration with real time operating system : a thesis submitted to the School of Engineering in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Engineering, Department of Electronics and Computer Syetem [i.e. Systems] Engineering at Massey University, [Albany], New Zealand

Abstract

Many commercial devices now being produced have the ability to be remotely monitored and controlled. This thesis aims to develop a generic platform that can easily be extended to interface with many different kinds of devices for remote monitoring and control via a TCP/IP connection. The deployment will be concentrated on Medical devices but can be extended to all serial device interfaces. The hardware to be used in the development of this platform is an ARM Cortex M3 based Micro-Controller board which has to be designed to meet the requirement set by the Precept Health the founder of this platform. The design was conducted at Massey University in collaboration with senior engineer from the company. The main task in achieving the aim was the development of the necessary software layers to implement remote monitoring and control. The eCosCentric real-time embedded operating system was used to form a generic base for developing applications to monitor and control specific devices. The majority of the work involved in this project was the deployment of the operating system to the Micro-Controller. During the development process, several hardware issues were discovered with the Ethernet interface and were corrected. Using the generic platform, an application was developed to allow the reading of Bi-Directional pass through a communication protocol from 4 isolated serial input channels, to an Ethernet channel using TCP protocol.