The HELIOS European project on software engineering

Abstract

The objective of the HELIOS European project is to create a Software Engineering Environment (SEE) to alleviate the development of medical applications. The resulting system can be viewed as a layer above an operating system providing services to the application designer, and finally to the application end-user. HELIOS is constituted of a set of Software Elements communicating through an abstract channel called Software Bus. The SEE kernel is made of three main software elements, the Information System, the Documentation Facilities and a component which provides the application user with a convenient user support interface, the Interface Manager. The Services consist of a collection of tools providing the necessary services to the medical application designers including an image processing toolbox.

The object oriented paradigm is used both as a methodology for the modeling of the entities and procedures found into an application and as the basic structure for building the Information System and the Interface Manager. Development standards include UNIX as the operating system and X-Window and OSF-MOTIF as windowing environments. The target application for the SEE is the development of a hospital ward information system with its ward image manipulation subsystem.