Implementation of Industry 4.0 in Transformation of Medical Device Maintenance Systems

Introduction

The fact about any developments and changes, including technological, is that we quickly forget how the world was without them. The invention of the internet had made a great impact on our lives. Can you imagine that it was approximately only four decades ago that we used paper maps and simple communication with other people to find directions about where we needed to go, or that students actually used a pile of books and encyclopedias to do research for school, or that we needed a cassette to play music, because a CD and USB flash was a major discovery then. Can you remember the time when a day, week, month or so was needed for information to travel the world and reach its destination, or the time when people waited certain periods to see family, relatives? Today, such common things are just “one click away”, because for everything we need to do “there is an application” that will help us do that. We can see that Industry 4.0. (Gilchrist, 2016) has already made an impact on society. Nowadays, we use cellphones to navigate, listen to music, do research, book meetings, but more importantly to communicate and share information with other people in such quick manner, no matter where we are. Moreover, in everyday activities, we are woken up by an alarm, we heat food using microwaves, and use thermostats to regulate heat in homes, we pay bills for electricity, water, phone and internet and other services, and we can do all of these by using applications. These applications and modern devices help in “getting things done” so people rely on these applications and do not rarely actually think about how is something performed, based on which principles or why. Such reliability and confidence must be deserved so it is usually said that: “In God we trust, all others require measurement.”

Measurements are crucial part of every application, but there is so little or none attention drawn to it. Would it be possible do anything without accurate measurements of time, length, weight, electrical energy, etc.? What would happen if time wasn’t measured accurately on the stock market, where billions of dollars’ worth of trade is conducted? It would cause millions of dollars losses and affect world’s economy. Measurements, therefore, have great impact in all fields of application, from science, industry to trade, and can be considered accurate, only if they can be controlled, i.e. if they can be traceable to internationally adopted standards of measurement. So, to ensure a common reference point and understanding measurement have been standardized, and scientific filed of metrology has been developed. Under this scientific field, metrological concepts including base unit system, measurement uncertainty and traceability have been developed accompanied with international standards and accreditation to ensure accuracy of measurement. Measurement, as defined by metrology, is a series of steps that lead to numerical approximation of real value that quantity has, expressed in agreed units of measurement, SI system. Given that each measurement is just an approximation of real value, it must be given with measurement error and uncertainty, which is a level of confidence to measurement result. Uncertainty represents a level of confidence to measurement result. If measurement is important to a certain application, then uncertainty of measurement is also equally important. Measurement result and its uncertainty directly impacts quality and costs of application. If the level of confidence to measurement result is higher, the measurement is costlier. It is proved that measurement errors can have critical effect to different fields of industry, from electronic to food industry and financial sector, but how they affect people and their health?

Figure 1.

Healthcare environment in the past

Figure 2.

Healthcare environment in the nowadays