Hospital Object Software Tools

Project Information

HELIOS II

Grant agreement ID: A2015

Start date 1 January 1992

End date 31 December 1994

Funded under

• Specific programme of research and technological development (EEC) in the field of telematic systems in areas of general interest - Health care (AIM) -, 1990-1994

Total cost € 0,00

EU contribution No data

Coordinated by

Hôpital Université Broussais
France

Exploitable results

HELIOS II: hospital object software tools

HELIOS-II has built up and integrated a medical software engineering environment (SEE) kernel, a set of generic medical services and a significant subset of a medical application (a ward information system subset) for demonstration. Applications developed with HELIOS-II have been evaluated and tested in a real hospital environment to verify the soundness of the proposed approach. HELIOS-II may be viewed as a layer above a distributed operating system providing services both to application engineers and to medical application end-users. Its architecture consists of 3 main parts, the bus, the kernel and the services. The HELIOS unification bus is both a communication channel and a complete integration framework based on a plug-in mechanism that makes it easy to add or remove components. The kernel consists of a set of strongly interconnected components required for the basic system functions. The object-oriented information system is the central module that serves as data and knowledge repository both when applications are being developed and executed. The analysis design and development environment covers the different phases of the software life cycle using an object-oriented approach. The interface management system and the multimedia manager gather the tools needed for the development of efficient and user-friendly interfaces. The services are an open set of medical oriented components which may be plugged into the system according to the needs of medical applications being developed. Image related services for image analysis, reconstruction and interpretation. The natural language processor allows medical texts to be analysed and their representations to be stored in the information system and queried when needed. The decision support system, relying on medical logic modules provides a mechanism for data-driven decision support, evoked by the execution of triggers in the information system. The medical documentation facility uses an hypertext/hypermedia approach to organise the consultation of medical knowledge and information resources. The medical connection service allows applications created with the environment to be easily integrated into broader clinical systems.