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Model-based design aids medical device test
Engineers can save themselves a lot of effort by carefully evaluating their designs in software before building hardware. Model-based design can be of significant value in helping isolate domain experts, such as medical-device or aerospace engineers, from the need to understand low-level hardware and software details.
Brett Murphy, manager of technical marketing at The MathWorks, recently made the case for early verification (Ref. 1). He said that aerospace and automotive members of the company's customer-advisory boards cite verification and validation as top priorities. Errors most often emerge at a project's specification stage, and fewer errors manifest themselves during design, implementation, and test. But engineers frequently don't detect the errors until the test stage.
One MathWorks customer that has employed model-based design is the Cleveland FES Center at Case Western Reserve University, which develops technology that can restore movement to individuals with neuromuscular disabilities. Robert Kirsch, PhD, a professor of biomedical engineering at Case Western Reserve and associate director of technology at the Cleveland FES Center, said that adopting model-based design reduced the development time of FES (functional electrical stimulation) devices and enabled researchers to build customized prototypes for patients many times faster than they could before.
Traditionally, Kirsch said, the organization has relied on a group of software engineers who wrote low-level assembly and C code to implement algorithms, safety features, and system checks specified by the systems-integration team. A successful implementation, he said, would take several iterations and would constitute a bottleneck, but model-based design tools allow programming to occur at a higher, block-diagram level, allowing engineers and clinicians to modify an FES controller application and immediately test the results.
