A Biosystems Approach to Industrial Patient Monitoring and Diagnostic Devices

A medical device is an apparatus that uses engineering and scientific principles to interface to physiology and diagnose or treat a disease. In this Lecture, we specifically consider thosemedical devices that are computer based, and are therefore referred to as medical instruments. Further, the medical instruments we discuss are those that incorporate system theory into their designs. We divide these types of instruments into those that provide continuous observation and those that provide a single snapshot of health information. These instruments are termed patient monitoring devices and diagnostic devices, respectively.Within this Lecture, we highlight some of the common system theory techniques that are part of the toolkit of medical device engineers in industry. These techniques include the pseudorandom binary sequence, adaptive filtering, wavelet transforms, the autoregressive moving average model with exogenous input, artificial neural networks, fuzzy models, and fuzzy control. Because the clinical usage requirements for patient monitoring and diagnostic devices are so high, system theory is the preferred substitute for heuristic, empirical processing during noise artifact minimization and classification.