Is a Qt-based UI reliable enough to be used in a medical device? [closed]

Question

I work for a small company developing a complex medical device with a rich UI. We are currently at the early stages of design. The application is targeted for Windows (desktop only) and preferably should be written only in C++.

After some research done we tend to choose Qt to develop the UI. It seems to answer all our needs, namely a modern-looking and highly responsive UI can be developed, the development is rather fast (after getting familiar), memory usage is somehow reasonable, free for commercial use (bonus for us).

My question is: is it reliable enough for a medical device? We absolutely can't accept any crash in the middle of an examination. I understand that first of all it depends of course on the quality of code we write but still I'd like to know if anyone has encountered any mysterious crash-related problems that were particularly hard to resolve. Especially when using QML that is a scripting language and it can naturally result in errors hard to predict and explain.

The cost of encountering such an issue in production will be very high for us, so we extremely need a right decision to be made before we go for any specific package. If you know any other Qt-related problem that could arise in our particular context (I admit that it was impossible to do a very extensive package testing), I'll highly appreciate mentioning it too.

Answer 1

In my opinion Qt is stable enough if you follow their coding style. I would also buy support from Digia and use a stable version of the library.

The thing comes down to:

• evaluating the risks introduced by the usage of Qt (or any other GUI library)
• act defensively against those risks (introduce new requirements and tests that cover the risks, e.g. run the GUI as a separate process that communicates with the core via TCP or whatever)
• evaluate the risk of a crash in the application and document the procedures to be followed when that scenario occurs.

In my experience with the certifications of medical devices, a loud crash of the device is preferable to a silent and erroneous operational one. When in doubt, ask the certification body that is following your case.

Also, have a look at the standards (e.g. 60601-1-4 or whatever is used now).

Usage of Qt in medical apps: http://qt.nokia.com/qt-in-use/qt-in-medical/