Health panel: a platform useful to physicians for fast and easy managing of FPGA-based medical devices

The Design of Medical Devices is frequently based on Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). This is especially due to their unique properties in order to fast prototyping and their great capabilities in Digital Signal Processing (DSP). The problem arises to make physicians able to manage such devices especially to set and program during prototyping, experimental and validation processes of new medical devices. Therefore, the objective of this paper is the description of a platform, named Health Panel, in its hardware and software components, overcoming these issues. The design methods and the test and debug methods are also detailed. The hardware is an Embedded System (ES) and the software, developed in Matlab environment, acts as user friendly interface making the physician able to manage quick and easy the FPGA. Results of tests and of an accurate debug of the platform are described. The platform aims at providing a significance contribution for designing hardware and software interfaces for an easy and quick use of FPGA-based medical devices. Conclusions and final remarks provide suggestions for future developments of the platform.