Re-engineering and Porting for Outdated Healthcare Product

When a product reaches the end-of-life phase of its lifecycle, inventing a completely new product is often not an option. Imagine that you produce a smart and complex medical device certified by regulatory agencies, connected to peripheral medical equipment, and used by thousands of patients in hundreds of hospitals nationwide. Your product has been commercially available on the market for a long time. However, the day comes when its components become outdated and unsupported, and an urgent decision has to be made on how to recover the product value.

One of Auriga’s clients faced a similar problem and asked us to upgrade an outdated complex system, some of the components of which had reached the end-of-life phase. To achieve the project goal, we ported the device-controlling application from a legacy platform to a modern ARM-based RTOS platform. OS Wrapper and HAL were also enhanced to support the newer OS version and to easily port the whole system to other real-time operating systems in the future. Our engineers also thoroughly examined the complex and multimode alarms systems and ported, tested, and verified 100+ alarms. In addition, Auriga’s team adjusted the edges of logic signals to sync the new MCU and legacy peripherals so they could communicate with each other without errors or interruptions.

A software-only company would have stopped there, but for us, it was just an interim goal. We strived to add more value for our Customer and ensure that the new product demonstrated the same behavior and functionality as the outdated system did. Neither Auriga nor our Сustomer was ready to launch the new product without ensuring its quality and reliability. When porting was completed, we implemented a special testing strategy to verify the results. Our engineers built a close-to-reality hardware prototype, replacing the old microcontroller with a new development board. This system allowed us to reuse legacy unit tests and instruments that already existed in the Customer’s code base and avoid simulation error risks. During the test phase, testers ran existing manual and auto tests using both original and modified units to ensure that they worked identically.

Airat Sadykov, Project Manager at Auriga, made the following comment:

We aimed at delivering a modern, safe, and reliable solution quickly and within a reasonable budget. The hardware prototype and the modular approach saved us time and money by minimizing testing effort and simulation risks and avoiding new certification issues. Our team managed to successfully move the product to a new platform, keeping its old functionality but also allowing new features. A fully operational and up-to-date device created by Auriga helped our Customer to ensure its position on the market and stay ahead of the competition.

Having worked closely with the industry leaders for over 25 years, Auriga has vast experience in dealing with the most challenging engineering tasks aimed at improving customers’ IT systems’ usability and effectiveness. Our portfolio is full of smooth re-engineering and porting solutions for the healthcare and other industries—and who knows? Maybe your project will be our next success story!

To learn more about Auriga’s experience in medical device software development, please visit our website or view all current case studies here.