Date: 09 Nov 1999 05:37:51 +0200 From: Giorgos Keramidas <keramida@ceid.upatras.gr> To: osiris2002@yahoo.com Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: FreeBSD and Patient Monitoring !! Message-ID: <86g0yguygg.fsf@localhost.hell.gr> In-Reply-To: Joss Roots's message of "Mon, 8 Nov 1999 08:54:44 -0800 (PST)" References: <19991108165444.26573.rocketmail@web107.yahoomail.com>
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Joss Roots <osiris2002@yahoo.com> writes: > Our hospital is using some patient monitoring hardware, things like, > Marquette Solar 2000, Ohmeda Anaesthesia Machines, etc. > > Most, if not all, of these machines have their supporting software 'a > propriety of the manifacturer', to display stuff like, > > ECG (EKG for North Am), Pulse Oximetry, Automated Blood Pressure, > etc. on a monitor. > > They all have SERIAL PORT communication. My question, is it possible > to find some software to get these values, and curves out of these > machines, and display/save/interpret them on a FreeBSD machine ? > > Anyone from HP, Marquette, Ohmeda out there can help ? I am not actually working in any of these companies, nor have ever heard anything about the equipment mentioned above. However, I can do some wild guessing about all this stuff. A serial port is a very generic interface for transmitting digital data, and this generic nature of it is it's power. However, you need to know /what/ to transmit and /when/ in order to communicate with something on the other end of this "interface." This knowledge of what to transmit and the time to send it, can be called a *protocol*. So, if HP or Marquette give you or somebody else the information about this protocol, it will be relatively easy to write simple programs for logging or even displaying under FreeBSD. Provided that this protocol is not some valuable-secret of HP or someone else, and it's what we call an _open_ protocol, you can do some interesting stuff with your FreeBSD. If that is not true (and there is no information on the communication protocol used) you're probably stuck with what your verdors provide you with. My apologies for my long and probably useless posting. -- Giorgos Keramidas, <keramida@ceid.upatras.gr> "What we have to learn to do, we learn by doing." [Aristotle] To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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