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HOT TOPIC: VIRTUALIZATION

Five Benefits of Virtualization in Embedded Medical Devices

Michael Taborn
Platform Architect
Intel® Intelligent Systems Group

The practice of medicine is increasingly data-driven. Blood pressure and oxygenation, respiration rate, and ECG are just a few examples of biometric data that enable physicians and other caregivers to monitor patients and deliver optimal levels of care.

Wireless networks based on Bluetooth* radio technology are now available to support a spectrum of sensors which allow freedom of movement and relative comfort for the patient. These sensors are providing medical professionals with real-time data for diagnosis and treatment.

Working together with LynuxWorks* and Portwell*, our team at Intel has created a healthcare proof-of-concept that demonstrates the value of Intel® Core™ vPro™ processors when combined with the LynuxWorks* LynxSecure* Hypervisor. This design balances CPU performance and workload distribution to maximize CPU usage in a multi-core Intel® Core™ implementation. 

Intel® Virtualization Technology (Intel® VT), a component of Intel vPro technology, is a hardware-based mechanism that enables multiple guest operating systems to run simultaneously on a single platform by supporting hardware separation of CPU resources, memory and I/O.

The demo system uses virtualization to simultaneously run the Windows* OS and Red Hat Linux* OS in two isolated virtual machines (VM). The Linux* OS is capable of pairing and collecting data from up to 20 Bluetooth* radios. The Windows* OS is used for the graphical user interface, plug and play peripherals and other non-deterministic software.

This design shows how a virtualized multi-core system can use commercial off the shelf hardware to help manufacturers cost-effectively integrate leading-edge technologies, while helping to meet stringent standards for reliability and data security.

Virtualization in embedded medical devices provides five principal benefits:

Easing migration to a new operating system

Migrating from an older version of the Windows OS to a new version can enhance the user experience, but the transition may require re-certification of critical software, such as code used for data collection.

Virtualization could enable manufacturers to keep the old OS running minimizing changes to legacy code in one VM partition but allow the new OS to be running in a separate VM. This will allows additional functionality to be inserted in the new OS possibly limiting the scope of the validation efforts for the entire design.

Simplifying integration of third-party applications

The addition of a new application, such as a third-party Linux*-based enhanced imaging application, can be made much simpler when the application and its native OS are placed in a separate VM. This technique could more accurately bound the performance of the new application to ensure the older application could still have resources to accomplish its task. 

Achieving cost-effective system consolidation

Multi-modal systems can reduce cost by avoiding the need to support multiple separate boards for unique functions. Virtualization could save bill-of-material costs by enabling multiple operating systems and applications, such as data acquisition, a human-machine interface and data processing, to run on a single board. 

Improving real-time performance

Many applications, such as data collection, require deterministic performance, while the human interface is more timing insensitive. To avoid competition and ease the integration of deterministic and timing insensitive applications, the real-time operating system (RTOS) and applications can be assigned to a VM on a specific processor core. This allows the development to proceed without having to always monitor the ‘user experience’ while ensuring RTOS performance.

Maximizing reliability

As we have seen, applications may run multiple software applications. To prevent memory conflicts and potential faults, virtualization can be used to allocate protected memory space and I/O resources to each application running in its own VM. In some instances, it may be desired to introduce another VM to act as a ‘watchdog’ or replacement VM in case of failure. Intel VT Technology allows these types of possibilities to be considered.

Virtualization technology enables many new use cases to be considered to distribute tasks and consider different approaches for traditional systems, maximizing the value of multi-core CPUs. From development to testing to certification, virtualization in embedded medical devices provides a new tool for the industry to make the benefits of continuing innovation available to medical professionals, while protecting investments in legacy applications.