A Smart Ambulance With Information System and Decision-Making Process for Enhancing Rescue Efficiency

Abstract

The system presented in this article is part of a research project to enhance the rescue efficiency of an ambulance or a rescue car using information technology and the decision-making process. It aims to support emergency medical services (EMSs) by improving the communication between staff at the incident location and competence centers such as hospitals. The increasing number of missions, especially, car accidents, in Thailand has created huge problems for the public health care system. Higher cost efficiency and treatment quality could be achieved by sharing both tactical and medical data. Medically relevant data, such as medical signals, auscultation, and video material, are transferred from the emergency site to the competence center via the telematic support system. Also, traveling distance relative to traffic management can improve patient survival during transfer using global positioning system (GPS) tracking. In this article, the tracking of incident locations and the monitoring of the patient's biomedical signals are achieved using portable GPS and medical devices. Smart glasses are employed in the video conferencing system. Application software, including the decision tree algorithm, has been developed to be used with cloud computing to manage video material, GPS, medical devices, and decision making for transferring a patient in this prototype system. The telematic support system in this research project can utilize both Wi-Fi and cell phone systems. The crucial requirements and the proposed hardware and software system architecture of the system for EMS are summarized. © 2014 IEEE.