Composable embedded systems for healthcare applications

Many companies developing high-tech products face a common challenge: how to improve the rate of innovation. Global competition, the increasing complexity of modern products, a shortage of suitably skilled technical staff and quickly changing customer expectations make this an essential business need. To remain competitive, companies must bring advanced products quickly and cost effectively to market without compromising on safety, performance or reliability.

Research objectives

The objective of the Allegio project is to improve the rate of innovation by developing model-based design, analysis and visualization techniques. When used at the beginning of the design cycle, these allow architects and engineers to create designs which can be rigorously analyzed and tested prior to realization.

The Interventional X-Ray family of products from Philips Healthcare allows surgeons to perform minimally-invasive medical procedures resulting in less risk for patients, shorter recovery times and lower overall costs. 

Model-based techniques hold the promise for users and designers to rigorously evaluate the operation of systems, allowing a wide range of scenarios to be tested under both normal and exceptional conditions. This is vital as safety must be maintained at all times, including during system failure conditions. This approach provides the opportunity to significantly reduce the number of prototype/test cycles that are required to bring a system confidently to market.

The Allegio project will focus on four key research themes: 

• Development of executable models of complex system behaviour based on requirements
• Visualization of the execution of models
• Analysis of data dependency, evolvability and performance of designs
• Refinement of automatic test generation tools (suitable for stimulating models and for testing actual implementations)

Expected results

By bringing together and enhancing leading academic modelling techniques used in the design and test phases of product development, the expected results are as follows: 

• Significant reduction in the typical development time of Philips iXR projects
• Exposure of design problems early in the design phase
• Verification of system behaviour against the expectations of stakeholders
• A design & test process which yields higher quality and easier to maintain designs than is possible with traditional methods

Partners

• Industrial partner: Philips Healthcare iXR Group
• Research partners: Axini, Delft University of Technology, Eindhoven University of Technology, University of Twente (2 academic groups)
• Consortium leader: Embedded Systems Institute (ESI).
  ESI has the responsibility for project management and knowledge dissemination. Also, ESI research fellows coach and supplement the research activities of the academic partners.

Publications

Allegio flyer (215kB)