Netspective: An Innovation Driven Approach to Safety-Critical IoT Solution

All IoT (Internet of Things) solutions are not created equal and not all work in every environment. Healthcare institutions and governments often need regulatory-compliant, safety-critical, and security-conscious solutions."When you're dealing with life-critical requirements like ICU health monitoring or EHR systems you can"t just use consumer-grade solutions. CIOs want us to make sure that IoT hardware, software, and their integrators focuson safety and security, along with functionality. Netspective helps our clients by enabling them to meet functional, regulatory and safety challenges with an open platform," says Shahid Shah, President and CEO, Netspective. The company has been delivering value by solving complex, real-world business, and technology problems for Healthcare, Government and Medical Technology industry since 1997."We design a lot of small medical devices that are attached to operating
beds or patients and the collected data are fed into safety critical clinical networks that need to make split-second decisions," adds Shah. Netspective has developed technology strategy and solutions it offers to customers to provide time to market advantages, reduced cost and most importantly achieve risk reduction, in the form of two solutions. The first: Fluent XA is the most important Netspective offering built on a multi-platform agent framework; it has built-in networking, user interface capabilities, and a web server at its core. "Our customers can use the core functionalities and add their custom code into the modular plug-in based system," explains Shah. "This is possible as all Netspective customers are provided the source code to perform the tweaks." The customizability of Netspective's agent framework makes it popular as it allows firms to stay relevant with newer and advanced regulations without the cost of building new infrastructure. The second: Fluent XS, a SaaS platform, with which data generated from patient's medical devices, can directly enter into the hospital's EHR to inform doctors about patient's ailments. These solutions are highly innovative, address several critical focus areas, and have been developed using a combination of Open Source and low cost platforms.An example of Netspective's resilience can be the incident when a client,an electronic medical equipment
manufacturer had trouble interconnecting their legacy devices. As most of those devices were built in the pre-IoT world, they did not have the codes, or basic software upgradation capabilities or metrics regarding their utilization. "Now, after building the gateways and the agents, legacy devices can connect to the network while field upgradable software which saves them a lot of money, and lastly with usage metrics, they can bill their customers efficiently," explains Shah.

Netspective's stewardship within this safety critical niche can be attributed to the team's unparalleled knowledge and insight gained by numerous CIO interactions and conferences Shah hosts on a vast number of healthcare topics.He is known to encourage his team to study the application of IoT in other safety critical sectors such as airlines and try to emulate them in healthcare systems. "We understand no two hospitals run the exact same way, so our products are built for extensibility," adds Shah. In their path of continuous improvement, Netspective is working on integrating device management into custom workflows. "We are getting deep into data architecture; understanding the volume, velocity by defining and designing Big Data Architectures that are coupled with IoT," explains Shah. In terms of software, Netspective is coming up with five new products for a host of different functions in the near future.