Technology for Life
Dräger is an international leader in the fields of medical and safety technology. Founded in Lübeck in 1889, Dräger has grown into a worldwide, listed enterprise in its fifth generation as a family-run business. Dräger has more than 16,000 employees worldwide and is present in over 190 countries around the globe. In 2022, the company generated net sales of EUR 3 billion.
After evaluating different technologies, Dräger chose Qt to implement the UI framework powering their medical devices. Discover the competitive advantages that Qt technology provided Dräger in the development of their medical devices.
1889
Year of foundaiton
16K
Employees
EUR 3B
Net sales in 2022
Qt Solution Highlights
Platform independence
Development on PC independently from target hardware and RTOS
Rapid development cycles
State-of-the-art user experience
Optimal performance on embedded systems
Excellent support from Qt Professional Services
Wide community and comprehensive documentation
We evaluated different technologies like HTML5, .Net, and other proprietary frameworks but ultimately selected Qt for its platform independence enabling development on PC and deployment to different types of embedded hardware with good performance.
Carsten Leischner, Director of Software Engineering, Dräger
See Our Interview with Dräger at Embedded World
Dräger's Award-winning Design System
While being highly efficient facilities, today's hospitals remain both physically and mentally challenging work environments. User-centric design helps reduce complexity, simplify clinical workflows, and enable a consistent discipline within the workplace.
Dräger takes these challenges very seriously and has devoted substantial efforts to the development of a Design System providing an effective and efficient solution to streamlining operations in the medical industry. The resulting award-winning design system is foundational for their medical products and embodies three key UX values: clarity of information, guidance, and safety of use.
As for flawlessly porting this design system to their machines, Dräger chose Qt technology.
Our framework for medical devices builds on top of the Qt framework. With Qt, we were able to deploy our state-of-the-art UIs on resource-constrained hardware without compromising the performance.
Carsten Leischner, Director of Software Engineering, Dräger
Develop on PC, Deploy Anywhere
When choosing the best technology for their medical framework, different technologies were evaluated—among which HTML5, .Net, and other proprietary frameworks. The great advantage Qt offered was its platform independence. While Dräger's team focused on designing the best user experience, the ability to create and test the software on PC (prior to its deployment to a specific hardware) significantly accelerated the development cycles.
As usual, when porting software developed on PC to its dedicated target hardware and operating system, performance requires optimization. Here, Dräger could leverage Qt Group's support to identify and resolve problematic parts, bottlenecks, and rendering issues.
The thing I like the most about Qt? Its lively community and energetic company. Developers like to work with Qt which can't be said for every other tool or framework.
Carsten Leischner, Director of Software Engineering, Dräger
Entrusting the Core Qt Experts
Working side by side with Dräger's development team, Qt Professional Services (PS) helped test and analyze their software on the dedicated target hardware and operating system. Backed by Qt Group's R&D department, Qt PS team assisted Dräger in devising the optimal solutions for their system configurations—sometimes as a code snippet to integrate similar functionality into their code, sometimes even as an update to the overall Qt framework.
Assistance in porting the Qt framework to newer versions of their chosen RTOS, optimization of the QML component for new hardware (including proposals for the best-suited hardware for their needs), support in ensuring the persistence on screen of safety-critical elements, are just some of the tasks where Qt PS successfully helped Dräger over the years.