Welcome to the MedURC Simulation Environment

Imagine ...

• your own personalized remote console for accessing your healthcare products,
• that your interaction with these products is by interfaces that are fully based on your abilities and preferences,
• that you create your own personal profile once, then your "on-the-fly" interface generator - your personal assistant - figures out the best interface for you to use a product, given where you are and what you want to accomplish,
• that in addition to being your interface assistant, it also works as your agent, translating information between your devices (such as to a TV screen) or with your health record - but only if you give the OK.

These are a few of the benefits of the Universal Remote Console vision.

Through this web page, the RERC-AMI at Marquette University introduces stakeholders interested in medical device interface design and evaluation to the potential added-value of the new Universal Remote Control (URC) suite of five standards: ANSI / INCITS 389-393-2005, often called the "V2" or "URC" standards. We are a member of this INCITS standards committee, which is now working on international implementation that will be known as ISO/IEC 24752 (yes, easy to remember - a URC that works for you 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, 52 weeks per year).

This site complements the pioneering URC flagship simulation site at www.myurc.org, maintained by the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Trace Center, that provides a glimpse of the vision of a URC as applied to consumer electronics and controlling household devices.

Our site offers a different technical implementation of the standard as well as a focus on interfaces for medical devices. Coined MedURC, our simulation demonstrates how this new standard can work for the medical community.

This contains several sections as follows:

• Background on URC initiative and standards process
• Basic ANSI/INCITS-compliant Target Files for MedURC applications
• Preliminary Accessibility and Preferences Survey
• "On-the-fly" MedURC interface generator, given target files and a socket
• Simulation environment: A web-based "instance" of the target device
• Interoperability issues: How to create your own URC that can use our site
• Brief summary of RERC-AMI V2 - URC Projects
• Slides from Pawan Shroff's Master's Thesis presentation on November 17, 2005, as pdf file

The primary reason for visiting this site is to try out the MedURC simulation of the new ANSI/INCITS "URC" standard, also called the "V2" standard. There are actually two technologies to try out:

1. Accessibility and Preferences Survey. Before using our on-the-fly interface generator, you should first complete this survey. This creates a user-specific XML file, or "user profile," that complements the four target-specific files, and is used by our generator to create an interface that is more sensitive to the abilities and preferences of you, the user.
2. MedURC Interface Generator. Once extracted into a folder of your choice on your Windows computer, this is what you run to automatically invoke a connection to our web site, and create an instance of the target medical device of your choice.

Both of these can be downloaded as a .zip file that must then be unzipped:

IMPORTANT: System requirements (Please read before downloading)

• Windows XP professional Operating System
• .NET framework 1.1 (obtain through free download from Microsoft)
• Internet connection (preferably broadband) with Internet Explorer Web Browser

Download the Accessibility Survey and MedURC Interface Generator

Your browser should prompt you for what to do with this file - choose to save it to a location of your choice. Once downloaded to your computer, follow the instructions below.

• Unzip the file downloaded using the Windows unzip utility (Right click on downloaded file and choose "Extract all")
• Now you should then have a new folder called MedURCsetup that includes a readme file, a help file, and a folder called Simulation.
• Within this folder should be two executable files, "Accessibility Preferences Evaluation.exe" and MedURC.exe"
• Run the first so as to create your personalized user file (by default called JohnDoe_AccPref.xml) that will then be available to our interface generator when you subsequently run MedURC.
• To run MedURC, you need to have Internet access, as the medical device "target" files are first read, and then an instance of a target socket is started for you that resides on the www.rerc-ami.org site.

We hope this experience is informational and perhaps even enjoyable. Remember that the MedURC interface generator knows nothing about the target device until the discovery phase, and that it is constantly generating on-the-fly interfaces - the beauty of the URC standard.

So once again iImagine a future where, aftering completing an interactive survey that captures your accessibility and preferences survey once, a person interacts with devices within their environment through automatically generated, personalized interfaces. Notice that this also fits in well with the vision of personalized medicine.

This demonstration site represents what we call Step 1. We plan to systematically improve the capabilities of this site, and toy add more classes of medical devices as targets. Of note is that in terms of interface content, each of our targets are intended to encompass the capabilities of a large number of products currently on the market.

Step 2 is to initiate partnerships with strategic players in the medical device industry, such as companies and governmental agencies such as the FDA. If interested, contact us!