A cloud-based healthcare infrastructure for medical device integration: the bilirubinometer case study

Medical devices, generally, have been unique units, so that a typical hospital room in an intensive care ward hosts a big number of stand-alone devices, each one with its own user interface. Nowadays, these devices have some connection mechanisms, but the goal is to go beyond the simple connectivity that permits only the reading of the measured value on a computer monitor, to move towards a more complex device integration that offers the possibility to stream device data directly into patient electronic records, to create a database for further statistical investigations and to integrate the information derived from multiple medical devices into a single display. In this paper, we propose a method to connect and integrate into a cloud-based infrastructure the bilirubinometer, which is a typical Neonatal Intensive Care Unit biomedical device that measures the amount of bilirubin in infants' blood, which is symptomatic of neonatal jaundice. After data extraction process from the instrument, the database is normalised according to a record format defined in XML language. Then, through Web Services of importation, data is transferred to the cloud database. It enables online sharing of encrypted healthcare data, reported in a standard language to allow a complete interoperability as well as a total security of shared data. Our proposed infrastructure allows the communication between different medical devices of a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit and permits the automation of the process of device data collection, transmission, storage, processing and availability for medical staff.