Case Studies

Hospital Bed Testing

Hospital Bed Testing
Posted in Application Development, Embedded Development & Programming, Manufacturing Automation and Intelligence, Medical and Pharmaceutical, Motion Control, Product Development, Web Application Development

Summary

DMC offers a solution for programming, deploying, and on-site testing of hospital beds. We program the controls for multi-axis therapeutic beds, including coordinated motions, software safety algorithms, and high-level engineering functions. DMC can also assist in hardware troubleshooting and product life testing.

Curtis VCL Controller

Curtis VCL Controller

Linear Servos

Linear Servos

Solution

DMC can write new code or take over ownership of existing code for a multi-axis therapeutic bed. We have experience ramping-up on existing hospital bed architecture and offering hardware and software experience to troubleshoot the overall system during development.

Due to diverse needs, such as coordinated multi-axis moves, software safety routines, and various business requirements, DMC's code divides programming logic from business logic. This enables business requirements to be easily added upon a reliable, low-level control structure. Thus, the desired performance of the bed is achieved while increasing maintainability and eliminating bugs and errors.

An important feature in this process, considering the beds’ intrinsic need to be safe and reliable when used by patients, is to ensure the robustness of the safety algorithms. DMC’s industry experience allows the projected failure modes to be addressed, and unanticipated modes to be discovered and handled. This includes implementing soft limits, filtering noisy signals, and architecting complex routines to handle obscure, hard to detect events.

DMC can also add enhanced features to the platform, such as better calibration, intuitive engineering scaling, and an integrated test mode. By designing high level functions like these into the code early on, the results anticipate and cover the customer’s needs for a supportable product. These features provide the finishing touches to the rest of the development work done by DMC and help move product lines towards a successful launch.

Customer Benefits

  • Improvement of robust architecture on existing code providing a more reliable performance
  • Separation of business logic and program control logic delivering more manageable code
  • Anticipation and inclusion of high-level features satisfying engineering needs
  • Enhanced calibration providing increased product longevity
  • Robust safety algorithms satisfying performance and UL requirements
  • Advanced signal processing allowing wider hardware tolerances and longer product life
  • Introduction of versioning system improving traceability

Technologies

  • Curtis Vehicle Control Language (VCL)
  • Microsoft Visual Studio
  • CAN communication
  • Serial programming and debugging
  • Embedded controller
  • Linear servos