Service-oriented Device Connectivity interface for a situation recognition system in the OR

Area of Science:

• Medical Informatics
• Human-Computer Interaction
• Software Engineering

Background:

• Context awareness in the operating room (OR) is crucial for providing targeted surgical assistance.
• Situation recognition systems (SRS) interpret intraoperative events to understand the surgical context.
• Modular system design requires decoupling SRS from other components, necessitating an interface.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop an open, standardized interface for loosely coupling SRS with varying context-aware systems (CAS).
• To enable vendor-independent device orchestration in the OR.

Main Methods:

• Conducted a requirements analysis to identify OR integration barriers for CAS.
• Selected an interoperability standard to specify a suitable base architecture.
• Integrated the developed middleware into a prototypic SRS and the OR-Pad CAS for evaluation during simulated surgeries.

Main Results:

• Implemented a middleware based on the Service-oriented Device Connectivity (SDC) standard for loosely coupled SRS and CAS.
• Verified the solution in a proof-of-concept study using the OR-Pad scenario.
• Evaluated CAS requirements fulfillment, SDC conformity, and integration effort, demonstrating middleware applicability and transferability.

Conclusions:

• The SDC-based middleware successfully demonstrates the feasibility of loosely coupling SRS with unknown CAS.
• This approach enables context-aware assistance in the OR through interoperable systems.