The Internet of Things (IoT) is going to be connecting billions of ordinary things and making each one accessible through the Internet. This will revolutionize the way virtually everything functions by providing valuable insight to consumers, manufacturers, and service providers. One of the industries already taking advantage of this technology by deploying connected devices is healthcare. The potential for improving the delivery of care, lowering costs, and introducing new remote medical services presents one of the biggest opportunities for medical device manufacturers and healthcare providers. As one of the top medical device manufacturers in the world, GE Healthcare has made the decision to use the RTI Connext Platform to help it communicate more effectively with connected devices in hospitals.
Real-Time Innovations (RTI), provider of the communications platform for the real-time Internet of Things, is going to supply GE Healthcare with its Connext Platform to deliver proven connectivity so it can link together medical devices and large equipment in hospitals.
According to the company, Connext DDS is the only messaging solution that combines standards compliance with ultrahigh performance and scalability without vendor lock-in, which allows it to avoid proprietary messaging approaches. This makes it much easier for different products to communicate with each other without compatibility issues of other platforms.
One of the Connext DDS solutions GE Healthcare will deploy is the Micro DDS, and according to RTI CEO Stan Schneider, GE engineers are going to use it to build a more connected patient care ecosystem so machines can be operated efficiently with a less expensive configuration.
Connext DDS Micro is designed for a small-footprint modular messaging solution for resource-limited devices that have minimal memory, Flash, CPU power or no operating system. It meets the demand of real-time performance requirements as well as the strict resource limitations they have. Some of the features of the platform include:
- Support for low-power CPUs
- Scalability from embedded 16-bit microcontrollers to multicore 64-bit CPUs
- Portability to other embedded or real-time operating systems
- Completely decentralized and easy-to-embed architecture with no message brokers or daemon processes
- Bundled source code
- Pre-built support for Linux (x86), Windows, FreeRTOS (ARM), VxWorks (PowerPC) and devices without OS (ARM)
- Standards compliant: based on DDS programming interface and RTPS wire interoperability protocol
"GE Healthcare chose the DDS standard because it can handle many classes of intelligent machines. RTI Connext DDS satisfies the demanding requirements of our devices and supports standardization on a single communications platform across product lines," said J Gustavo Perez, general manager for MI&CT Engineering at GE.
Edited by
Maurice Nagle
