Non-intrusive Patient Simulator for Medical Ventilator Software Verification

Abstract: Testing distributed real-time systems has been pervasively proven a challenging task within numerous industries. When the real-time nature of a system is combined with safety critical medical systems, having a reliable test system is of major importance. However, the hardware dependency makes it very difficult to test medical ventilator software system in failure mode and requires manual manoeuvres, prohibiting test automation for numerous features. To achieve entire test automation, an embedded patient simulator is proposed in this thesis. A simulator that simulates a human lung runs separately on embedded platform and interacts with the ventilator so that all the hardware dependencies could be removed. It is of non-intrusive implementation and all the real-time properties  of the ventilator software system could be tested on target. Software-implemented fault injection is realized as well, which is a significant step to fault-tolerance testing for safety critical system.