that this can only be achieved because the parameters preceding the invasive blood pressure are the same in all columns and because they use a fixed format for communication if for example the parameter preceding the invasive blood pressure would be ecg in one column and sao 2 in another one equidistant timing intervals could not be guaranteed as sao 2 needs more time for communication with the master processor than the ecg it can also be readily seen that a matrix fulfilling these requirements can be obtained by entering the parameters with the shortest sampling periods on top of the columns whereas parameters with longer sampling periods are entered below these when entering parameters with equal longer sampling periods into the columns of the matrix they may be entered either in different columns or alternatively in the same columns one after the other in the latter case attention has to be given to the total communication times in a time interval i e the master processor has to calculate the total length of communications within a time slice and ensure that these communications do not exceed the total time of 2 ms when generating such a matrix first the parameters with a sampling period of 2 ms e g ecg have to be entered then the parameters with a.