This NSF award supports a planning workshop on Innovation in Medical Cyber-Physical Systems. This activity arises from an interagency exploration of emerging CPS research directions. The meeting will develop plans for further assessment by the CPS community of biomedical research needs and opportunities. The meeting and subsequent community-wide assessment are conducted in the context of the interagency High Confidence Software and Systems Coordinating Group.
(CPS), an emerging discipline that seeks to harness progress in science and technology to enable innovation in engineering modern systems, by integrating principles and practice from physical modeling, dynamics and control, real-time embedded computing, computing architectures, networking and wireless communication, and certification and assurance technology. Opportunities for CPS-enabled innovation in medical device technology include, as examples, coordinated interoperation of autonomous and adaptive devices, new concepts for managing and operating physical medical systems using computation and control, miniaturized implantable smart sensing and actuating platforms, energy harvesting, body area networks, programmable materials, and new fabrication approaches such as 3D printing. The proposed workshop is intended to bring together academic, clinical, and industry experts in technologies and processes, as well as government representatives, to identify and explore new CPS manifestations in design methods and platforms that would encourage radical innovation in next generation diagnostic and therapeutic devices and their control, integration, and manufacturing. The overarching goal is to find safer, more effective, more capable, and more reliable solutions than with current approaches, and to consider solutions that will cross the kinds of domains indicated in the examples below. The outcome of the workshop is expected to be a set of problems for the research community to address by breaking down boundaries that separate disciplines to enable the creation of safe, useful systems that embed cyber capability into physical systems. The workshop report will justify why this area needs substantial investment, and quantify the impact of this research on the quality of healthcare, as well as identifying challenges, opportunities, and roadmaps. Research proposals in this area would focus on science and technology that can affect the next generation of medical device systems, rather than incremental improvement of existing devices. This could be approached by identifying medical device problems in need of attention and determining the technology needed to solve them, or by identifying a possible capability and identifying which applications could utilize this capability. The transformation of the control, computation and communication of a system could empower us to do something that otherwise could not have been done, such as personalizing the quality of care, predicting events that otherwise couldn’t be predicted, performing more tasks in real-time, and adapting to emergent and faster technology. The workshop is expected to produce specific concrete examples to get researchers engaged and to help them see the research as relevant to healthcare. To explore these concepts and develop a plan for the National NSF Workshop on Medical Device Innovation Using Cyber Physical Systems, a planning meeting was held on July 18-19 2012 at the NSF facilities in Arlington, VA. This meeting brought together 31 U.S. experts from academia, industry, and the clinical domain, as well as 11 representatives from federal agencies. This diverse group had expertise in CPS research, clinical research, medical device interoperability, critical care, rehabilitation, informatics, bioengineering, and other areas. In a combination of plenary and breakout sessions, the participants discussed clinical challenges and opportunities where new enabling CPS technologies may be transformative to patient care, presented brief overviews of some of these technologies, identified synergies across research domains, and identified three major research areas of interest: Health & Wellness and Telemonitoring Reanimation, High Acuity Health Care, Surgery and Intensive Care Closed-Loop Control Systems and all that they entail Preliminary plans for the full Workshop were developed, including recommendations for speakers. Engaging the research community in visioning medical device innovation using cyber physical systems will be the overall goal of the Workshop. Key objectives include (1) educating the CPS community about over-the-horizon medical technology needs and opportunities, and the medical device development community about emerging CPS technologies and capabilities; (2) encouraging investigators to think about CPS at the medical device design stage rather than as an afterthought; (3) envisioning how new CPS technology could influence new medical device capabilities and open up new device opportunities; and (4) providing FDA perspective on the pathway to integrate CPS technology and methods into medical technology to make devices more reliable and safe. The Workshop is expected to develop a report by NITRD NCO that guides future science applications for CPS research technology. NSF is currently working on a schedule and plan to hold this Workshop in early 2014. This meeting achieved the dual goals of educating this group – the clinical participants learned about technologies that could help them, and the CPS researchers got a clear picture of the kinds of healthcare problems that could benefit from technology solutions – and igniting interest in working together to organize and present these concepts to a broader audience, both CPS and clinical. In many ways, the planning meeting served as a microcosm of the kinds of interactions that are desired for the full Workshop.
