Hydra: a C-language environment for real-time DOS multitasking at the bedside

Patient monitoring at the bedside is an inherently parallel job, best handled by multiple individual tasks running concurrently. Cost and diffusion considerations strongly favor the use of PC's at the bedside, but their most widespread operating system, DOS, is not built for multitasking. Hence...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:International journal of clinical monitoring and computing 1993-10, Vol.10 (3), p.147-154
Main Authors: DEGAETANO, A, COLEMAN, W. P, PIZZI, R, TOMASELLA, E, CASTAGNETO, M, GRECO, V
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Algorithms
Biological and medical sciences
Computer Communication Networks - instrumentation
Computer Systems
Computerized, statistical medical data processing and models in biomedicine
Drug Therapy, Computer-Assisted - instrumentation
Humans
Medical computing and teaching
Medical Records Systems, Computerized - instrumentation
Medical sciences
Microcomputers
Monitoring, Physiologic - instrumentation
Neural Networks (Computer)
Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted - instrumentation
Software Design
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Summary:Patient monitoring at the bedside is an inherently parallel job, best handled by multiple individual tasks running concurrently. Cost and diffusion considerations strongly favor the use of PC's at the bedside, but their most widespread operating system, DOS, is not built for multitasking. Hence, a software platform in C language has been prepared, allowing the intermediate programmer to easily write independent modules which will then run simultaneously without conflicts. Such a platform aims at allowing effortless sharing of data among concurrently running processes, while providing strong insulation between tasks, enough to allow multiple copies of any one task to run simultaneously unknown to each other. A cooperative, memory sharing multitasking paradigm has been chosen, which offers fine granularity of timeslicing and low execution overhead at the price of some loss in generality of design. Speed, data exchange capability and number of stackable windows are greater than with commercial packages like Windows or LabWindows. Dynamical reprioritization of tasks is built in, allowing the computerized monitor to focus its attention and resources on urgent tasks.
ISSN:0167-9945
DOI:10.1007/BF01246448