Design Pillars for Medical Cyber-Physical System Middleware

Our goal is to improve patient outcomes and safety through medical device interoperability. To achieve this, it is not enough to build a technically perfect system. We present here our work toward the validation of middleware for use in interoperable medical cyber-physical systems. This includes clinical requirements, together with our methodology for collecting them, and a set of eighteen `design pillars' that document the non-functional requirements and design goals that we believe are necessary to build a successful interoperable medical device system. We discuss how the clinical requirements and design pillars are involved in the selection of a middleware for our OpenICE implementation.