Hardware acceleration for real time simulation of physiological systems.

Testing of medical equipment such as pacemaker is a critical task, because any malfunction may cause patient death or serious and long-lasting health consequences. Thus, device behavior under normal functioning conditions as well as under faulty conditions should be tested as thoroughly as possible under the project's budget. This paper presents a real-time digital simulator (DRTS) for possible use in testing of medical devices. The simulator runs a model of a physiological system (an organ or a group of organs) in real time and uses A/D and D/A cards to interface the simulation results to real medical equipment. With this simulator, the tests can be made as thorough as needed without much increase in cost.