Auriga executed reengineering and porting of an outdated medical product

In September, 2016 it was announced that the Auriga company successfully executed reengineering and porting of an outdated medical product.

At each product – the lifecycle, and, sooner or later, each product reaches "terminal station": hopelessly the equipment, the platform, the software or even the technology direction becomes outdated. However, it is not always reasonable to develop absolutely new product at this moment. And business not always in a cost component: at decision-making it is worth taking into consideration time expenditure on an output to the market, search of the reliable contractor or engineers to the internal project, problems with certification, verification and validation of a new product, costs for market positioning and advertizing. And all this time competitors literally "breathe in a nape".

Provide that you make the difficult medical device which is switched on in a difficult ecosystem with the numerous peripheral equipment. Thousands of doctors and patients in hundreds of hospitals through the whole country daily use your device. Long time your product was "on a horse", however that day when its components became outdated came and ceased to be supported by the producer. Now you need to make tough decision – how to recover product value, without losing the positions in the market?

One of customers of Aurigi faced a similar problem and asked the company to update an outdated life-supporting product which some components reached completion phase of lifecycle. Within the project the Aurigi command ported the controlling application from the bit platform which was outdate the 8th on more modern 32-bit ARM Cortex-M4 with the large volume of RAM and the improved performance. OS Wrapper and a layer of hardware abstractions (HAL) were optimized for support of the new version of the operating system with a possibility of fast porting of all system on other OSRV in the future.

The system of the customer was equipped with more than hundred complex signals of alarm for emergency situations – and engineers of Aurigi, after in-depth examination, ported, tested and verified all signals, having prepared the corresponding accompanying documentation. Besides, the Aurigi command made correction of fronts of control signals that the new microcontroller and the existing periphery could interact without errors and failures.

The normal developer company would stop at this stage, but for Aurigi porting was only the intermediate purpose. As declared in the company, they aimed "increase business performance of the customer and be convinced that the new product has all same functionality, as an old system". Neither Auriga, nor the customer were ready to start a new product, risking its quality and reliability.

When porting was complete, in Aurige applied special testing strategy to check of its results. Engineers of the company created the hardware prototype as close as possible to a projectible product, having replaced the old microcontroller with a new payment. Such system allowed them to use the unit tests and tools which are already existing in code base of the customer and to avoid risks of simulation. On a test stage testers started manual and automatic tests, using both the original, and updated modules to be convinced that they work equally.

"Development of the modern, safe, reliable solution in a short time and with the reasonable budget was our purpose. The hardware prototype and modular approach helped us to save time and money, having minimized costs for testing and risks of simulation and also allowed to avoid the long procedure of certification, - Ayrat Sadykov, the project manager in Aurige told. - Our command managed to transfer successfully a product to the new platform with preserving of its old functionality and a possibility of adding of new features in the future. Thanks to the device which is completely functioning, updated Aurigoy, the customer could strengthen the positions in the market and enhance competitiveness".