Invited talk: Challenges in Medical Cyber-Physical Systems

Abstract

As computers and communication bandwidth become ever faster and cheaper, computing and communication capabilities are embedded in all types of objects and structures in the physical environment. Harnessing these capabilities to bridge the cyber-world with the physical world will allow the development of applications with great societal impact and economic benefit. At the heart of these applications are cyber-physical systems consisting of integrated computational and communication cores that interact with the physical world, with intelligence provided by embedded software. Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) are engineered systems that provide tight integration of and coordination between the cyber world of computing and communications and the physical world. CPS are to meet the needs of the new generation of engineered systems that are highly dependable, efficiently produced and certified, and capable of advanced performance in computation, communication, and control. CPS will transform how we interact with and control the physical world around us, as the Internet transformed how we interact and communicate with one another and revolutionized how and where we access information. One application domain of CPS is Medical Cyber-Physical Systems (MCPS), which are life-critical, context-aware, networked systems of medical devices. Medical device industry is undergoing a transformation, embracing the potential of embedded software and network connectivity. Instead of stand-alone devices that can be designed, certified, and used to treat patients independent of each other, distributed systems that simultaneously control multiple aspects of the patient's physiology are increasingly used in hospitals to provide high-quality continuous care for patients. The combination of embedded software controlling medical devices, networking capabilities, and complicated physiological dynamics of patient bodies makes MCPS complex. The need to design complex MCPS that are both safe and effective presents numerous challenges, including achieving high assurance in system software, interoperability, context-aware intelligence, autonomy, security and privacy, and device certification. In this talk, I will discuss these challenges in developing MCPS and present some of our work in addressing them, and several open research and development issues.