The medical device data language for the P1073 medical information bus standard

A new object-oriented Medical Device Data Language (MDDL) has been developed by the P1073 Medical Information Bus (MIB) Standard Committee, under the auspices of the Engineering in Biology and Medicine Society (EMBS) of the Institute of Electronic and Electrical Engineers (IEEE). The MDDL treats devices, host computers, persons and parameters as objects, and provides methods for describing and passing messages between objects. An elegant method of specifying parameter attributes incorporates the inheritance and encapsulation qualities common to object-oriented languages. Existing standards for device, parameter and attribute nomenclatures are used to represent MDDL components whenever possible. The MDDL provides a rich and extensible method for standardized host-device communications.