Emergency Medical Monitoring System Essay
Integration of biomedical devices for continuous, real time and automated patient monitoring emergency system
System objectives
Emergency medical situations require responders to effectively care for patients with limited personnel and medical infrastructure, often under intense time pressure.
In large-scale medical emergencies, emergency medical service (EMS) officers coordinate ambulatory transportation for victims, while relying heavily on information from responders in the field. EMS may need critical up to date information and procedures in order to structurally respond to the situation.
Rapid and accurate triage (counting and sorting) of patients is a critical step in the response process. Paramedics perform initial triage by attaching colored triage tags to patients with color assignment based on respective priority. The medics call their EMS officers and report the patient count so EMS can …show more content…
organize ambulance pickups accordingly but this may limit the number of lives that can be saved; Medics and paramedics may also need critical information about the procedures to take to cure and save lives on the field and need to live update remote hospitals or Emergency centers about critical patients and receive quick response and procedures for patient cure.
Insufficient information is often provided to EMS officers regarding the developing needs of the ongoing response. Even worse, patients who are mobile can often depart the scene without being authorized to do so. When patients who are contaminated with hazardous materials depart before they are decontaminated, public facilities and receiving hospitals become at risk for secondary exposure. These events in turn create an organizational nightmare for the EMS officers who are responsible.
With response teams working in these types of chaotic environments, patients often wait for extended periods of time before ambulatory transport arrives. During this waiting period, patient conditions may deteriorate. In addition, secondary injuries such as hypoxemia, hypotension and cardiac tamponade may arise. To address these problems, current emergency response protocols require paramedics to periodically re-triage patients. Every 5, 10, or 15 minutes, patients with red, yellow, or green priorities are re-triaged, respectively. However, this important protocol is time consuming and not very practical for an emergency situation.
Continuous, automated, real-time updates on patient conditions seem to be the only way to ensure effective patient care in large-scale emergencies.
Monitoring packs used by responders during routine ambulance runs provide the required updates but can only track vital sign trends of a single patient.
On the other hand, bedside-monitoring systems used in hospitals can track multiple patients but require mainframe-computing systems that are not suitable for field use.
We propose a wireless electronic triage, with multiple biomedical sensors (EKG, pulse oximetry, non-invasive blood pressure) and integrated location sensors to yield continuous, automated, real-time patient monitoring. These devices transmit data over ad-hoc mesh networks to a patient monitoring computer.
Each device is constructed with inexpensive electronic hardware and operates on software suitable for embedded systems with limited memory and computational power.
Medical disaster relief personnel can benefit from our automated triage system because it is portable and yields data in real
time.
Additionally, recent events in global terrorism, military conflicts, and natural disasters raised international concern on casualty care and suggest that there will be increasing demand for efficient field triage solutions in the future.
It is with these issues in mind that we have developed the Continuous, Automated Real-Time Triage System (CART triage system). With MEMS manufacturing and economy of scale, we envision CART devices to be disposable and practical solutions for a broad range of medical emergencies, from routine ambulance runs to mass casualty disasters.
System overview
System components
System development
Resources
Timeline
System objectives
Emergency medical situations require responders to effectively care for patients with limited personnel and medical infrastructure, often under intense time pressure.
In large-scale medical emergencies, emergency medical service (EMS) officers coordinate ambulatory transportation for victims, while relying heavily on information from responders in the field. EMS may need critical up to date information and procedures in order to structurally respond to the situation.
Rapid and accurate triage (counting and sorting) of patients is a critical step in the response process. Paramedics perform initial triage by attaching colored triage tags to patients with color assignment based on respective priority. The medics call their EMS officers and report the patient count so EMS can …show more content…
organize ambulance pickups accordingly but this may limit the number of lives that can be saved; Medics and paramedics may also need critical information about the procedures to take to cure and save lives on the field and need to live update remote hospitals or Emergency centers about critical patients and receive quick response and procedures for patient cure.
Insufficient information is often provided to EMS officers regarding the developing needs of the ongoing response. Even worse, patients who are mobile can often depart the scene without being authorized to do so. When patients who are contaminated with hazardous materials depart before they are decontaminated, public facilities and receiving hospitals become at risk for secondary exposure. These events in turn create an organizational nightmare for the EMS officers who are responsible.
With response teams working in these types of chaotic environments, patients often wait for extended periods of time before ambulatory transport arrives. During this waiting period, patient conditions may deteriorate. In addition, secondary injuries such as hypoxemia, hypotension and cardiac tamponade may arise. To address these problems, current emergency response protocols require paramedics to periodically re-triage patients. Every 5, 10, or 15 minutes, patients with red, yellow, or green priorities are re-triaged, respectively. However, this important protocol is time consuming and not very practical for an emergency situation.
Continuous, automated, real-time updates on patient conditions seem to be the only way to ensure effective patient care in large-scale emergencies.
Monitoring packs used by responders during routine ambulance runs provide the required updates but can only track vital sign trends of a single patient.
On the other hand, bedside-monitoring systems used in hospitals can track multiple patients but require mainframe-computing systems that are not suitable for field use.
We propose a wireless electronic triage, with multiple biomedical sensors (EKG, pulse oximetry, non-invasive blood pressure) and integrated location sensors to yield continuous, automated, real-time patient monitoring. These devices transmit data over ad-hoc mesh networks to a patient monitoring computer.
Each device is constructed with inexpensive electronic hardware and operates on software suitable for embedded systems with limited memory and computational power.
Medical disaster relief personnel can benefit from our automated triage system because it is portable and yields data in real
time.
Additionally, recent events in global terrorism, military conflicts, and natural disasters raised international concern on casualty care and suggest that there will be increasing demand for efficient field triage solutions in the future.
It is with these issues in mind that we have developed the Continuous, Automated Real-Time Triage System (CART triage system). With MEMS manufacturing and economy of scale, we envision CART devices to be disposable and practical solutions for a broad range of medical emergencies, from routine ambulance runs to mass casualty disasters.
System overview
System components
System development
Resources
Timeline