DESIGN OF A PC-BASED PATIENT SIMULATOR FOR TESTING AND CALIBRATION OF ELECTROMEDICAL DEVICES USING LABVIEW Pedro Pablo Escobar, Gerardo Acosta INTELyMEC, Fac. of Engineering, UNCPBA University, Del Valle Av. 5737, Olavarría, Argentina Marcos Formica Fac. of Bioengineering, UNER University, Ruta 10, Km. 11, Oro Verde, Paraná, Argentina Keywords: Patient simulation, testing, calibration, education, electromedicine. Abstract: Modern digital biomedical devices need a testing and calibrating equipment to asses its functional state with the appropiate technology, so patient simulators have become an essential tool for maintenance and biomedical engineers. An interactive virtual instrument was developed in Labview for simulation of healthy and pathological conditions to test biomedical devices which acquire, register and store temporal evolution of human physiological variables. In this article we present some details of the design and implementation of a simple pc-based patient simulator using Labview, in order to obtain a low cost solution for teaching and practical purposes. 1 INTRODUCTION Medical science relay for decades on biomedical devices that technology developed continuously, such as ECG, EEG and others which had very limited features at the beginning and were relatively expensive. As the years went by, we found that these devices were reducing their size, enhancing capabilities, adding new features and changing the visualization and registration ways (Neer, 2003). On the last two decades, biomedical devices have had a vertiginous evolution which brought a lot of new features including non-invasive signal acquisition, data-processing, automation and others; but also brought the necessity of calibrating them and verify its functional state with an appropriate technology (Bronzino, 1995). Then, patient simulators for biomedical devices broke into the market and nowadays they have become an essential tool for biomedical and maintenance engineers on every health institutions worldwide. With the constant advance of technology, not only biomedical devices but also simulators incorporated new capabilities and connectivity improvements. In spite of these evident advantages, simulators have a high cost, especially for hospitals and health centres in developing countries, situation that sometimes turns them into prohibitive and makes impossible the proper maintenance of the devices, because of the lack of adequate evaluation instrumental. There is a bunch of interesting commercial solutions available in the market, from many manufactures, but most of them are designed for specific medical applications so they can simulate a set of parameters for these applications in particular, for example, an ECG patient simulator for testing ECG biomedical devices. The cost of any of these analysis tools is high and this led us to design our own tool using resources available at the university labs and a moderated investment on technology, with the main objective of develop a double purpose device: a patient simulator and a teaching tool. Teaching of Electromedicine is often based on the integration of electronic and physiological knowledge applied to the comprehension of how a device works and why is it malfunctioning. It is remarkable that patient simulators are extremely useful for teaching and practicing electromedicine anywhere, and for all the people who use and maintain modern medical devices. On our laboratories, the main obstacle for testing and calibrating different kinds of electromedical 135 Pablo Escobar P., Acosta G., Acosta G. and Formica M. (2008). DESIGN OF A PC-BASED PATIENT SIMULATOR FOR TESTING AND CALIBRATION OF ELECTROMEDICAL DEVICES USING LABVIEW. In Proceedings of the First International Conference on Biomedical Electronics and Devices, pages 135-139 DOI: 10.5220/0001055201350139 Copyright c  SciTePress