An incomplete and biased survey on selected resource management for distributed applications as basis for interoperability of medical devices

Abstract: The popularity and wide spread of IoT technology has brought about a rich hardware infrastructure over which it is possible to run powerful applications that were not previously imagined. Among this infrastructure, there are the medical hardware that is progressively advancing but at a slower pace. Nevertheless, medical devices are more powerful now to run more sophisticated functions and applications and exchange big data with external systems in a secure and safe fashion. Towards the design of an architecture for interoperability of medical devices, this paper initially focuses on the background work that is taken by the author for this objective. The paper briefly describes the role of the software in the advances of medical systems and their possibilities for interoperability. It focuses attention on the distribution software layer that is responsible for connectivity, efficiency, and time-sensitivity in the basic operation of medical systems such as exchange of information and commands across devices and systems. The paper analyses a number of previous work on middleware (mostly performed at his research group and also in a broader research community), and pay especial attention to the middleware for web-based systems and how they relate to the development of distributed medical systems.