Principles and Benefits of Explicitly Designed Medical Device Safety Architecture

The complexity of medical devices and the processes by which they are developed pose considerable challenges to producing safe designs and regulatory submissions that are amenable to effective reviews. Designing an appropriate and clearly documented architecture can be an important step in addressing this complexity. Best practices in medical device design embrace the notion of a safety architecture organized around distinct operation and safety requirements. By explicitly separating many safety-related monitoring and mitigation functions from operational functionality, the aspects of a device most critical to safety can be localized into a smaller and simpler safety subsystem, thereby enabling easier verification and more effective reviews of claims that causes of hazardous situations are detected and handled properly. This article defines medical device safety architecture, describes its purpose and philosophy, and provides an example. Although many of the presented concepts may be familiar to those with experience in realization of safety-critical systems, this article aims to distill the essence of the approach and provide practical guidance that can potentially improve the quality of device designs and regulatory submissions.