There isn't really a direct way to to this.
On Windows you could set your Caption to some specific value and then in the other programs use FindWindowA to search for that caption, but that's a Windows only solution.
What I would suggest is to simply create a generic control file and have the processes that you want to check on simply lock/extract specific records. If you want to see if the process is running just try to access the associated record and if that request fails then the process is running. Also, should a process die (gracefully or not) the lock will be cleared.
This approach also has the advantage that the control file could in fact be accessed remotely using mapped/mounted drives.