ABSTRACT
Ventricular assist device (VAD) implantation for patients with advanced heart failure as an alternative therapy to heart transplantation has increased patients’ survival and quality of life thanks to improvements in the pump’s geometry, local and supervisory control systems. Suppose the supervisory control system for these devices is considered an open system, in that case, an approach considers integrating various agents that interact collaboratively to determine the behavior. In addition to the physical device and its local control system, there is the patient and the medical team assisting this patient. In this way, a VAD can be considered a cyber-physical device, in which characteristics such as intelligence, connectivity, and reactivity can be observed. Based on this paradigm, there was a possibility of improvement from the interaction and collaboration between cyber-physical VADs capable of communicating with a supervisory control system. While the local control system is responsible for the device’s drive functions, the supervisory system is responsible for managing several local control systems of each VAD. The connectivity between the devices is a fundamental characteristic for the proposal of intelligent VADs, which can offer the multidisciplinary medical team tools to monitor the patient’s condition and decision support algorithms that make up the supervisory system. This new context causes an evolution from cyber-physical VADs to an architecture based on Reference Architecture Model for Industry 4.0 (RAMI 4.0) to allow the reconfiguration of VADs in a new paradigm based on Health 4.0.
