A Mixed E/E-Architecture for Interconnected Operating Tables Inspired by the Automotive Industry

Since interoperability in the operating room (OR) is considered a main factor to increase safety and improve the quality of surgeries, new challenges arise for the medical device industry in this increasingly connected environment. Therefore, new architectural approaches are needed, some of which may be inspired by other domains. In the meantime, novel communication paradigms are also gaining practical relevance in the automotive industry, which faces similar challenges. As a result, service-oriented architectures (SOAs) are often considered to provide a higher degree of flexibility for changes during the development and after product deployment. In this paper, we derive requirements of future networked OR tables from challenges and trends ahead. Based on these requirements, we propose a mixed electric and electronic architecture (E/E-architecture) inspired by the state-of-the-art measures from automotive domain and present an Identity and Access Management (IAM) approach to improve system security. In addition, a prototypical implementation is used to demonstrate the practicality of the proposed solution and to discuss necessary adjustments to the development process resulting from a mixed E/E-architecture approach.