Safety Analysis of a Medical Robot for Tele-echography
Résumé
Among many types of medical equipment, ultrasound diagnostic
systems are widely used because of their convenience and safety.
Performing an ultrasound examination involves good eye-hand
coordination and the ability to integrate the acquired information
over time and space. Some of these specialized skills may lack in
some healthcare centers or for emergency situations.
Tele-consultation is therefore an interesting alternative to
conventional care. Development of a high performance remote
diagnostic system, which enables an expert operator at the
hospital to examine a patient at home, in an emergency vehicle or
in a remote clinic, may have a very significant added value.
Therefore a robotic tele-ultrasound system is proposed in order to
realize the examination in small towns or cities without needing
highly qualified medical staff. This system for Robotic
Tele-Echography (TER) is designed and developed by a French
consortium composed of universities, hospitals and industrials
companies. In such systems safety is critical. The robot share its
working area with the operator and have a close interaction with
the patient. Safe behavior in all circumstances is guaranteed by
complete management of hazards (their identification, evaluation,
and control) throughout the life cycle of the system, particularly
in the early stages. Hence, system safety activities are
multi-disciplinary and entirely linked with systems theory and
systems engineering. In this context, pieces of information are
usually corrupted because of the great number of experts using
various languages. To handle this issue we studied a safety
analysis process integrated with one modeling language used for
systems specification and design. The size, complexity and
criticality of many of today's robotic applications led us to
choose object-oriented development and the industrial standard UML
(Unified Modeling Language) as the language. We also chose UML for
its fault prevention characteristics, and for its expression power
in the robotics field.
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