AUTOMATIC MONITORING OF THE MEDICAL EQUIPMENT PERFORMANCE USING ELECTRICAL SIGNATURE ANALYSIS

Abstract

In industry, keeping the production line running in good conditions, is an objective of the maintenance department in a factory. This is crucial to avoid both of the equipment failure and the production loss. The same concept can be applied to maintain the proper operation of the medical equipment in a hospital. To achieve such a requirement the hospital should organize a predictive maintenance program that anticipates any operation fault and gives the necessary warning to take the proper maintenance action. This goal will guarantee the safe operation process of the equipment together with the reduction of the maintenance cost. Getting the accurate information about the equipment performance at the right time is necessary to detect any fault occurrence. In this work, the Electrical Signature Analysis (ESA) is applied to identify the medical equipment-operating modes. ESA is also applied for fault detection during the equipment performance. A noninvasive data acquisition system was built to record the electric current consumption of the equipment. Based on the recorded data, the operating modes are identified and its performance is evaluated. The developed system is installed and tested to monitor several types of medical equipment. This monitoring technique was able to detect modes of operation, faults or degradation of its performance. ESA provides quantitative measurements of the equipment effective usability. Such measurements give indications about the equipment availability. Promising results were obtained from testing several equipment.