  The popularity and wide spread of IoT technology has brought about a rich
hardware infrastructure over which it is possible to run powerful applications
that were not previously imagined. Among this infrastructure, there are the
medical hardware that is progressively advancing but at a slower pace.
Nevertheless, medical devices are more powerful now to run more sophisticated
functions and applications and exchange big data with external systems in a
secure and safe fashion. Towards the design of an architecture for
interoperability of medical devices, this paper initially focuses on the
background work that is taken by the author for this objective. The paper
briefly describes the role of the software in the advances of medical systems
and their possibilities for interoperability. It focuses attention on the
distribution software layer that is responsible for connectivity, efficiency,
and time-sensitivity in the basic operation of medical systems such as exchange
of information and commands across devices and systems. The paper analyses a
number of previous work on middleware (mostly performed at his research group
and also in a broader research community), and pay especial attention to the
middleware for web-based systems and how they relate to the development of
distributed medical systems.
