DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF EFFICIENT INTEGRATED SYSTEM FOR PHYSICAL MEDICINE WITH CENTRALIZED MANAGEMENT OVER COMPUTER NETWORK.

The cabinets for physical therapy are provided with various devices which shorten the time needed for patients' recovery and healing. A typical physical medicine cabinet has tens of stand-alone devices for different purposes. These are the devices which perform biostimulation using diadynamic or interferential electrical currents, ultrasound waves, vacuum impulses, electromagnetic fields, etc. The aim of this paper is to present hardware and software components, and developed network protocol for integrated system of devices for physical medicine, based on the existing products of Elektromedicina company, with key feature that allows the devices to be centrally managed and monitored. This paper addresses the system's architecture, user interfaces both for devices and centralized server console, network protocol for communication between devices and centralized management station, the scheduler, and the therapy procedure within the system. It will be shown that the efficiency of the integrated system, measured in the time-per-patient and patients-per-day, compared with the efficiency of regular physical therapy cabinet is increased by more than 20%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]