In medicine many medical devices which monitor the condition of the patients are controlled by the software. The US Food And Drug Administration looks after the developments in the medical software device and now FDA is also focusing on regulatory oversight on medical device software development process and system level testing.
There are different types of software used in medical devices and they are given below:
Analysis:
Devices such as X ray computed tomography scanners measure the raw data which can’t be understood by the people. Therefore, a software is used to interpret this data through images to understand the images easily.
Medication Pumps:
These devices are used to pump certain amount of plasma, blood, saline or other medication in to patient’s body and many aspects of these treatments are controlled by the software.
Expert Systems:
For taking decisions regarding diagnostic and therapeutic processes, many doctors take the help of software.
Monitors:
Machines used to measure rate of the heart beat, blood pressure, breathing rate use software to interpret the sensor information and display it in a meaningful way on a monitor.
Medical Informatics:
Medical informatics also called as health informatics is a combination of information science, medical science and computer science. This subject deals with the resources, devices, and methods required to optimize the acquisition, storage, retrieval, and use of information in health and bio medicine. Medical informatics tools are applied in nursing, clinical care, dentistry, pharmacy, public health, occupational therapy and biomedical research.
Therapy Delivery:
These software provides fault tolerant, real time, mission critical monitoring of cardiac rhythms and associated therapy delivery in implantable pacemakers and defibrillators.
