Custom Drug Library

ProtoLink helped a manufacturer of medical infusion pumps to move from a situation where their devices contained a fixed library of drugs available for infusion stored in ROM to a situation wherein the pumps can receive and utilize custom drug libraries sent by an external application.

To make this happen, we modified the embedded application which runs the pump and developed a Custom Drug Library editing application for both the Windows and Pocket PC platforms.  This application allows the user to define a library of drugs and then download it to a serially-connected pump.  Drug libraries can be saved to disk for later retrieval.  We simplified the porting of this application between the aforementioned platforms by providing a clean break between user interface code and the remainder of the program logic.

One challenge which was overcome on the project was that of programmatically constructing drug name bitmaps for display on the pump's LCD from within the embedded application that runs the pump.  To circumvent the limited processing resources of the pump, ProtoLink devised an efficient algorithm for building these bitmaps by concatenating individual character bitmaps for each character in the drug name.