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    Medec

    Built with Qt

    Medec’s Qt-Based Anesthesia & Critical Care Medical Devices Offer Superior User Experiences with Patient Safety in Focus.

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    Qt in Medical Systems - From rotary knobs to safety-critical UIs

    Qt has helped Medec create new automatic ventilator system software with the best-in-class user experience designed to ensure equipment reliability, which is vital for patient safety.

    Medec has been a front-runner in modernizing ventilator systems for the medical industry. Those ventilators are highly sophisticated and feature many advanced modes, settings and monitoring options. With advanced features, you need sophisticated and easy-to-use software so an operator can control and monitor the patient with confidence during operation. With Qt, Medec has developed the centerpiece for their latest flagship product – The Puretouch UI displaying all crucial information with a single glance on the 18.5” touchscreen with an AMD APU G-Series SOC under the hood. In an industry which has been focused on the mechanical aspects of medical devices, the Puretouch UI really makes Medec’s Caelus product range stand out from the crowd.

    "Qt Quick has really improved our design workflow. With ease, we now turn visual designs directly into dynamic prototypes in QML, skipping the step of clickable prototyping in third-party tools. The resulting QML code then serves as the basis for further development of the user interface. "

    Yve De Buysscher, Senior User Experience Designer, Medec Benelux

     

    Working with Qt Professional Services 

    To ensure a flying start to their project, Medec hired service engineers from The Qt Company who provided initial training to get their developers up to speed on the framework and tools. The engineers also assisted Medec initially with technical challenges related to the integration of custom visual elements into the Qt Quick scenegraph so that they could create their branded look & feel to the UI. 

    In addition, Medec faced performance challenges – which the Qt engineers solved by statically linking the libraries in the application as well as using the Qt Quick compiler to boost the UI performance, eliminating the need to compile the QML code at runtime. These are common pitfalls, which are not always obvious. By investing in Qt Professional Services you ensure a smooth and successful project from the start as well as for future projects and the maintenance of existing software.

    Medec

    With more than 40 years of experience in the medical device industry, Medec specializes in developing anesthesia solutions ranging from manual devices to complete ventilators and breathing stations. Every day 25.000 patients all over the world are safely taken through surgery by a Medec anesthesia workstation.

    "We chose Qt because it is simply the best C++ toolkit with excellent UI capabilities available – nothing can really compete with Qt for multi-OS applications."

    Tim Verstraete, Senior Medical Systems R&D Engineer, Medec Benelux

    Fast UI Development

    The smooth and responsive graphics that allow you to swipe from one waveform to another fluently are created with the Qt Quick module – the standard library for creating QML applications. This made it fast and simple to write fluid user interfaces with high performance. The safety-critical user interface controls the gas mixer and displays all ventilation parameters and the UI can be easily configured, without the need to use any rotary knob. All changes are affected directly on the display by the touch of a finger and having the full overview of all the safety critical functions is vital to ensure patient safety.

    Certified Qt Medical Systems

    When designing medical systems, you have to analyze the risks associated with your device and ensure that the system design avoids unacceptable risks. When offering medical equipment in the US and EU strict regulations and guidelines need to be followed and Qt’s support for the international standard IEC 62304: Medical device software – Software lifecycle processes turned out to be a huge plus for Medec. By separating life supporting and system-critical tasks from the main logic and implementing the required watchdogs and ‘social checking’, where each subsystem performs checks on each other, Medec’s system verifies its own system health status, fully complying with the IEC standards and guidelines.

    Cross-platform code reuse

    Medec considered different technologies such as HTML5 and GTK before initiating the project but decided to use Qt for several reasons. The use of QML, Qt’s own declarative UI language, made it easy to create a compelling UI and complete the integration of the UI and backend to Linux embedded with one single toolkit. Also, due to Qt’s cross-platform capabilities, Medec was able to re-use the code and port the software to laptops running Mac OS and Windows enabling their sales force to demo and simulate the system during customer visits – bringing the entire ventilator system would be impractical and expensive.

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