Modern surgical departments are characterized by a high degree of automation supporting complex procedures. It recently became apparent that integrated operating rooms can improve the quality of care, simplify clinical workflows, and mitigate equipment-related incidents and human errors. Particularly using computer assistance based on data from integrated surgical devices is a promising opportunity. However, the lack of manufacturer-independent interoperability often prevents the deployment of collaborative assistive systems. The German flagship project OR.NET has therefore developed, implemented, validated, and standardized concepts for open medical device interoperability. This paper describes the universal OR.NET interoperability concept enabling a safe and dynamic manufacturer-independent interconnection of point-of-care (PoC) medical devices in the operating room and the whole clinic. It is based on a protocol specifically addressing the requirements of device-to-device communication, yet also provides solutions for connecting the clinical information technology (IT) infrastructure. We present the concept of a service-oriented medical device architecture (SOMDA) as well as an introduction to the technical specification implementing the SOMDA paradigm, currently being standardized within the IEEE 11073 service-oriented device connectivity (SDC) series. In addition, the Session concept is introduced as a key enabler for safe device interconnection in highly dynamic ensembles of networked medical devices; and finally, some security aspects of a SOMDA are discussed.

In recent years a movement from distributed systems controlled by users to automatic, autonomous and self-configuring distributed systems is noticeable. Web services is one approach but lacking the secure integration of resource-constrained devices. This paper describes the devices profile for web services (DPWS), underlying protocols and a DPWS toolkit implementation based on C and gSOAP and discusses its current state. It has enormous relevance for embedded systems and industrial automation since DPWS targets resource-constraint devices explicitly, and has the potential to shift the industrial landscape which is characterized of heterogeneous devices.

Acute patient treatment can heavily profit from AI-based assistive and decision support systems, in terms of improved patient outcome as well as increased efficiency. Yet, only very few applications have been reported because of the limited accessibility of device data due to the lack of adoption of open standards, and the complexity of regulatory/approval requirements for AI-based systems. The fragmentation of data, still being stored in isolated silos, results in limited accessibility for AI in healthcare and machine learning is complicated by the loss of semantics in data conversions. We outline a reference model that addresses the requirements of innovative AI-based research systems as well as the clinical reality. The integration of networked medical devices and Clinical Repositories based on open standards, such as IEEE 11073 SDC and HL7 FHIR, will foster novel assistance and decision support. The reference model will make point-of-care device data available for AI-based approaches. Semantic interoperability between Clinical and Research Repositories will allow correlating patient data, device data, and the patient outcome. Thus, complete workflows in high acuity environments can be analysed. Open semantic interoperability will enable the improvement of patient outcome and the increase of efficiency on a large scale and across clinical applications.

The Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) is a lightweight application layer protocol for the Internet of Things. CoAP is based on HTTP mechanisms to build RESTful Web services. In contrast to HTTP, CoAP was designed for machine-to-machine (M2M) communication and uses a binary representation. This allows efficient transport and processing in resource-constrained networks such as Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). Due to the analogy to REST, a mapping between CoAP and HTTP is possible. In this paper one of the first translating CoAP-HTTP proxies is presented, that provides HTTP clients transparent access to CoAP resources and vice versa. Furthermore, caching relieves CoAP servers, which solves a key challenge for the Internet of Things: to allow a constant/permanent availability of resources from a network of constrained devices, which are required to minimize data transmissions due to their noticeable restrictions in power consumption. We describe, which issues of the translation we found during the time of implementation and testing, and explain how the proxy handles these issues. Finally, an evaluation, using real WSN hardware, is given, and an approximation scheme on how much transmissions can be saved by caching resources is provided.

Publish/subscribe protocols have proven to be a very flexible, efficient, and scalable approach for machine-to-machine (M2M) communication in the Internet of Things (IoT). Due to the convergence of IoT and industry, and the evolving Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), these protocols face new challenges and increasing communication requirements. However, it is not known to what extent the protocols can fulfill these requirements. In this paper, we examined the most commonly used IoT protocols that are either based on publish/subscribe or define the use of it through standard extensions. Based on a literature review, we derived concrete requirements for the use in the industrial domain, compared the characteristics of the protocols, and evaluated them with regard to these requirements. Our results show that none of the examined protocols can completely fulfill all the requirements and therefore further modifications are necessary.

Currently, Open Platform Communication Unified Architecture (OPC UA) is nominated as a reference standard to meet all Industry 4.0 demands with one protocol, enabling an efficient communication between devices in industrial systems. Recently, OPC UA has been extended by a publish/subscribe pattern to support multicast communication since there is a need for an efficient data aggregation and distribution to cope with the increasing number of controllers, sensors, and measured values in industries. Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) is the most widely used publish/subscribe communication protocol and is based on a central broker for message exchange. In this paper, the communication latency of OPC UA end devices exchanging data over MQTT as a broker-based middleware is investigated and compared to the client/server-based communication. In particular, we analyze the use case of one-to-many communication for a crane model from the material handling domain. We provide a prototype implementation of the OPC UA MQTT extension and our evaluation results show the reduced traffic overhead and communication latency compared to client/server-based communication.