Organ Telemonitoring in Ex-vivo Nutrition Circulation of Porcine Lungs Using Interoperability Standards

This paper discusses existing communication standards in the field of medicine and their applicability for a telemonitoring system for a mobile circulatory module. This module hosts an explanted porcine lung during transportation from the explantation site to a laboratory environment. The telemonitoring modules must enable to assess the wellbeing of the lung and the survival of the tissue as expressed in basic parameters that are measured in the circulation and nutrition module like liquid pressure, liquid flow and temperature. The parameter readings need to be displayed for monitoring purposes on a tablet-PC. Thresholds for parameters shall be set remotely and exceedance of these thresholds shall trigger the transfer of alarm messages to the tablet-PC.The goal of this work is to evaluate existing interoperability standards according to these requirements in order to select a set of standards that will then be used for implementation of the system. Standards that have identified and examined are ISO/IEEE 11073-20601, HL7 Version 2.x and ANT+. It was found that existing standards support large parts of the requirements. However detailed gap analysis will be necessary as the implementation continues.