News from HIMSS - Cisco, HP, and CARDIAC form new healthcare infrastructure alignment

One problem that the concept of healthcare infrastructure IT has always faced is the fact that much of the environmental signaling that needs to be channelled still lies in the analog domain. While middleware vendors grow exponentially, the ability to use analog world signaling such as relay closures has been problematic.

 Lantronix, a company that has spawned innovative new products in the past has recently released their Intellibox device that interfaces two RS232 /RS485 ports and two lines of I/O. In addition, the unit sports what they call EvenTrak technology that can watch for events at specific intervals. The unit can then send pre-determined user-defined commands to the device in order to take corrective action. The dual I/O ports can be tasked with monitoring, say, relay closures from an elevator alarm, or pressure/temperature alarm switch closure. This data is then propagated to an optically isolated 10/100 ethernet connection. I asked specifically about the want of more I/O lines and they responded that they are evaluating the additional of more lines. In the meantime, though this remains an interesting tool for bringing the analog and digital worlds together on the network.