This system monitors a patient's EKG during exercise on a treadmill or a bike ergometer. The system controls the automatic progression of the treadmill speed and grade, the acquisition and display of EKG data (acquired at a rate of 8000 samples/sec for each of 8 channels) and the generation of printed reports from a thermal printhead style writer. This system was created using the QNX operating system and we believe that it was the first commercial product based on the Photon microGUI system to be shipped. This product was featured on the front page of QNX News

Although it is now discontinued, Audrey™ was one of the first Internet Appliances developed by a major corporation, in a drive to leverage the power of the Internet to simplify our everyday lives. With the exception of the Browser components, Sterling was responsible for programming most of the user interface for Audrey, including the Datebook, Email client, Address Book, Action Palette and numerous configuration programs. Sterling was also involved in much of the behind the scenes development.

The American College of Cardiology - National Cardiology Data Registry is a country wide database that tracks the outcome for cardiology patients that have undergone interventional procedures. Its purpose is to provide feedback to hospitals as to the success of their procedures when compared to national averages. The success of this database is dependent upon the capture of a large amount of patient and procedure related data which must be recorded with a high degree of accuracy. Sterling was tasked to create a browser based system that could be used by hospital staff to view and edit this data while incorporating inter-field rules described in the ACC specification. The data is stored in a complex tree like hierarchy in an SQL database and, once confirmed, is serialized according to ACC formatting rules into a number of output files for transmission to the ACC.

The SIM400 was developed to acquired and analyse First Pass cardiac images where a radioactive agent is injected into the carotid vein and followed during its passage through all chambers of the heart and the pulmonary vessel system. 25ms frames taken over a typical 30 second study permit accurate analysis of the ventricular wall motion and hence inference of wall defects due to ischemia and/or infarction. In addition, a motorized chair system was developed to permit the acquisition of CT-like SPECT images of the heart. Sterling was responsible for all of the software development on the Macintosh and on the PC-controlled chair system.

ST Guard is a Windows based system used to the track the trend of the ST segment level in the ECG's of up to 10 patients being monitored by Marquette (now part of General Electric Medical) bedside monitors. The ST segment level is indicative of cardiac ischemia and/or infarct and monitoring changes in this level is important in chest pain clinics and emergency rooms to determine the efficacy of therapies like the "clot-busting" drugs streptokinase and ATP. This system presents a main display containing the ST trends for all 10 monitored patients and permits a drill down to a detailed graphical view of the trended ECG's for each patient. This system also incorporates alarm logic to alert the user to undesirable changes in a patient's ST level

This embedded system controls the water flow through an engine dynamometer attached to the output shaft of an engine under test. The amount of water flow, and hence resistence being applied to the engine, is dependent on the testing profile and the measured rotational speed of the engine as well as other inputs. The software developed by Sterling for the engine controller implements the PID algorithm required to run the testing profile as well as communicating to a Windows based host in order to receive control information and to report realtime data information.

This printer based on the Motorola 5272 ColdFire processor and utilising a USB connection to the host computer is capable of drawing at least 32 traces at chart speeds in excess of 100mm/sec. Sterling, drawing on its experience with the implementation of thermal printing in a number of medical devices, implemented all of the software in this device including the USB interface and the highly efficient thermal drawing algorithms.

VitalView is a QNX-based central station used to monitor clinical vital signs (ECG, Heart Rate, Blood Pressure, Saturated Oxygen, Gases, etc.) from both ambulatory and non-ambulatory patients in a hospital setting. Realtime ECG, SPO2 and other physiologic waveforms are collected via a serial or 802.11 wireless link connection and are displayed together with alarm conditions on the central station monitor for upto 8 patients. Physiologic data is trended and an optional paging function is enabled to inform caregivers of significant changes in the patient's conditions. 7 VitalViews may be networked to permit coverage of upto 56 patients. Sterling has been responsible for the majority of the software development on this system for several years and continues to make improvements.

The PrecisionFlo device is used to inject sealant in car chassis during the automotive production process. The monitoring, trending and storage of the parameters of the injection process such as flow rate and pressure is conducted by a QNX/Photon based system developed by Sterling. The hardware interface between the QNX system and the injection hardware consists of an industry standard CAN bus.

This system distributed by an energy management and marketing company is used to monitor the gas and electricity consumption of medium to large businesses. This ruggedized device acquires data by counting contact closures on gas and electricity meters found in remote locations and is designed to operated in an unattended fashion. The meter reader connects to the Internet at regular intervals (typically once per hour) and transmits the collected power consumption statistics. Also, at the time of connection, the reader updates its internal clock using the NTP protocol and looks for software and configuration updates. Sterling was commissioned to develop the software for this product after software development using a different softwere platform failed to provide the required reliability and stability. Meter readers running with the Sterling created software layered on the QNX operating system has run for months completely unattended.

This Linux based software was developed by Sterling to speed the transfer of image data from a RAID system to high speed circuit lithography system manufactured by a major player in the circuit board and chip manufacturing industry. Image data is read and decompressed on the fly as the lithography process istaking place, making the maintenance of data rates absolutely critical.