Brenda Marie Rivers
Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory has received funding from the Defense Health Agency and U.S. Army to lead an initiative focused on developing systems based on a proposed interoperability framework for medical technologies.
APL is leading a multidisciplinary team that includes Philips’ healthcare business to create a medical device interoperability reference architecture to inform the production of future medical systems, APL said Monday.
MDIRA will serve as a technical blueprint for ensuring interoperability between medical devices while implementing system security standards to support autonomous and remote healthcare.
The team will additionally develop an MDIRA-compliant system to demonstrate the reference architecture and its capacity to support military applications as well as emergency response for civilians.
Erik Wolf, acting director of the Army Medical Research and Development Command's medical simulation and information sciences research program, said that deploying autonomous medical systems compliant with MDIRA will help the service branch ensure preparedness against peer and near-peer adversaries.
Steven Griffiths, MDIRA project manager at APL, noted that the effort seeks to establish consistent healthcare operations while “reducing opportunities for errors and communication breakdowns", especially in repetitive tasks.
The APL-led team intends to use IEEE 11073 Service-Oriented Device Connectivity standards as a basis for MDIRA.
