| 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.
|