Cyber-Medical Systems: Requirements, Components and Design Examples

Cyber-medical systems will produce a major revolution in health care, by both raising the quality of care and reducing its cost, thus reaching an important social and economic goal. The evolution of electronic devices and systems has already enabled societal changes. Inroads in the quantification of medicine, in the discovery and applications of biosensors in connection with integrated circuit technology, in the analysis of large-scale real-time biomedical data are strong indicators that cyber-medical systems will redesign health care in the years to come. To sustain this thesis, this paper presents three aspects of cyber-medical systems, describes their medical significance and potentials, and then delves in the detailed technology required to realize such systems. Specifically, this paper describes state of the art sensing devices and their integration into platforms, data processing for ultrasound medical imaging and system correctness approaches for drug administration support systems. The paper concludes with a brief outlook on the evolution of this emerging field in the years to come.