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AdMIT's Sentinel is a low-cost, intelligent, self-contained data acquisition system
that stores data and interfaces with any serial medical device. The Rabbit 2000 microprocessor
drives the system's Ethernet Intelligent Device Connectors (EIDCs), which enable "plug-and-play"
connections from virtually any device to a sophisticated embedded relational database. |
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| Rabbit for a Healthier World |
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Using the Rabbit shaved off
four to five months of development time.
—
Dennis Rieger, President
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Rabbits are good for your health! Just ask Dennis Rieger,
president of Advanced Medical Information Technologies (AdMIT), Inc.,
makers of the Sentinel universal data acquisition and management system.
With a little help from Rabbit Semiconductor, the Sentinel is giving healthcare
professionals unprecedented instant access to vital patient and clinical
information, resulting in better treatment decisions and increased efficiency
in record keeping and accounting.
Rieger and his design team chose the Rabbit 2000 microprocessor to help
the Sentinel system meet demanding connectivity challenges in the infinitely
complex world of medical devices. The powerful 8-bit Rabbit processor
is called upon to drive the system's Ethernet Intelligent Device Connectors
(EIDCs), which enable "plug-and-play" connections from virtually
any serial medical device to a sophisticated embedded relational database.
"The Sentinel technology provides real-time data acquisition directly
from medical monitoring or testing devices right at the patient's bedside,"
says Rieger. "With the TCP/IP capabilities of the Rabbit processor,
data from any device—whether it's a monitor, IV pump, or blood analyzer—can
be accessed anywhere over a wide area network through the EIDC, which
is directly connected to the device." In other words, specialists
can be consulted, treatment records accessed, and drug interaction databases
queried—all in the blink of an eye.
Data Breakthrough
Termed a breakthrough in what's called point-of-care connectivity, the
Sentinel system dramatically improves healthcare decision-making, while
at the same time saving medical administrators time and money.
Marketed to OEMs in the medical technology field, the Sentinel system
intelligently consolidates any number of clinical or laboratory instruments
into a single data management server, reformats the information into a
standard medical data format, and then interfaces the data directly with
laboratory, hospital, or clinical information systems.
"The Ethernet Intelligent Device Connector automatically identifies
the medical instrument as soon as it is connected," says Rieger.
"Test result, patient, or quality control information is automatically
captured, consolidated, and transferred to the Sentinel system for processing,
storage, and reporting."
All of this information is instantly available to caregivers and laboratory
staff anywhere via LAN, WAN, dial-up, or wireless connections.
In hospitals or health care facilities that do things the old way, data
is generally read off the monitor by a clinician or test device and then
copied onto paper. Later, it is transferred into a computer system for
clinical or billing purposes. "This causes substantial delays in
providing the doctor with the necessary data to help make an informed
decision on patient care," says Rieger. "It also delays billing,
which has a major impact on the hospital's operations, increasing costs."
With the Sentinel system, what took hours, days, or weeks now takes only
seconds or minutes, leading to better patient care at lower cost.
Rabbit-Quick Connectivity The Sentinel system's Ethernet capabilities
facilitate lightning-quick wide-area network communications in various
medical settings—from doctor's offices, hospitals, and clinics to
nursing homes and home care environments. "Let's say we have multiple
blood draw centers throughout a city, and they want to put a specialized
set of blood analyzers at each site, but they want to have all the data
come back to their central laboratory and have one guy, a central lab
manager, be in control of all of that data," says Rieger. "
With our system—and the Rabbit-powered EIDCs—they can do that.
All they have to do is take our connector on the serial side, plug it
into the blood analyzer, and the other side plugs into the network."
The primary components of the EIDC are the Rabbit 2000 processor, a RealTek
Ethernet chip, RJ-45 connector, serial transceiver, DB9 connector, interfaced
Flash and SRAM to run substantial custom code, and additional support
circuitry to gain UL/CUL, FCC, and CE certification.
"A combination of things sold us on the Rabbit processor,"
says Rieger. "First, it's a chip with several built-in functions—a
system on a chip, if you will. The serial ports are on it, which was important
to us, as well as some other peripherals. Next, cost was important because,
quite frankly, we are competing with larger-scale corporations. So we
had to be extremely aggressive on price. Another key consideration was
the development environment. With the Rabbit, we were looking at something
that has a complete set of development tools, like the Dynamic C¨ software,
its built-in libraries and, in particular, the royalty-free TCP/IP stack.
And then the final thing, because we had a couple of different people
working on the product, were the low-cost development kits."
Development time with the Rabbit was minimal, enabling Rieger's team
to reduce its initial time-to-market projections. "We think using
the Rabbit shaved off four to five months of development time," he
says. "Providing that stack and the tools was the most helpful factor—the
combination of the tools and the overall cost allowed us to move forward
much quicker."
By "getting there quicker" on the initial design, engineers
had more time to take advantage of the Rabbit's design flexibility and
install unique software features to accommodate the infinite number of
medical devices and protocols.
"There are a lot of issues in a hospital where there might be hundreds,
if not thousands, of users and devices," says Rieger. "Network
traffic is pretty intense, and there is a lot of quirky stuff about how
all these devices are handled. So we often have to install custom features
to control this. Fortunately, the Rabbit's flexibility and development
environment allow us to rapidly go in there and put in special functions.
A lot of our ability to handle all these different medical devices is
built into the software on the Rabbit."
Fit for Life
The Rabbit 2000 is proving a perfect fit for a Sentinel data acquisition
system that considers operational elasticity its forte. "With most
data acquisition systems, operating parameters are pre-established: You
set up the connection, access an operator interface that tells you what
kind of device you have on each port, and so on," says Rieger. "Well,
in our environment, you can't do that—there could be any number of
devices hung off one patient, and they could be changing constantly. There
is no operator interface—you just plug in any number of devices with
unique serial protocols and run them all concurrently. The system figures
out on the fly who it is, loads the right software, changes the protocol,
and just starts talking and pulling data off instantly."
Perhaps the main benefit of the Sentinel system is its ability to provide
a complete, universal data acquisition system that allows any serial device
to be plug-and-play. "This is more important for medical than anywhere
else," says Rieger, "because when you have a patient in crisis,
you need to be able to instantly send, process, and receive data."
Based in Culver City, California, AdMIT is planning to expand the
Sentinel technology for use in industrial applications. For more information,
call 310.436.7105
Submit your design application
success story to press@rabbitsemiconductor.com
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