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Oral presentation at IEEE Engineering Medicine Biology Society conference. Sep 2005.

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August 2005. Inside the triage ambulance at BWI Fire and Rescue department.

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VitalMote Software

patient monitoring and reporting software suite

Alex Alm, Tia Gao

A usb transceiver is plugged into a laptop to communicate with the patients' VitalMotes. This transceiver can plug-and-play with any USB compatible device – such as a laptop, tablet PC, or PDA.  A VitalMote software suite runs on the laptop: its capabilities include vital signs monitoring, map-based patient tracking, and a pre-hospital patient care reporting tool.  The patient care reporting tool is an enhancement on a currently deployed system known as Michaels, developed Optimus Corporation.  Presently, Michaels laptops are installed inside advanced life support ambulances in Arlington Country, Virginia.

Paramedics can use VitalMote software to monitor their patients in the treatment zone.  All alerts are listed inside a side panel, making multiple alerts easier to manage. The base station regularly transmits patient data (vital signs, location, triage color) and alerts for multiple patients to the database via a wireless network. If network connectivity is unavailable, the Vitalmote software suite continues to operate.

Vitals Monitoring

VitalMote software detects an anomaly in the patient vital signs, it immediately generates an alert in the graphical user interface. The medic can locate a patient in several ways, either by selecting to view a map of the disaster scene marked with the location of each patient or by pressing the “Ring Patient Audio” button to sound a buzzer and blink the patient’s mote.  If the patient has a medical record that has been previously entered, information from the medical record such as patient age and height to adjust tge thresholds of the alert detection algorithms.

Location Tracking

We integrated three types of location tracking capabilities –  a transport-based locatiation system to provide information of where the patient is inside the transportation flow, a GPS to provide geolocation, and indoor location detection system to provide location where the GPS signal cannot be reached.

Transport-based localization keeps track of where the patient is in the transport process. The system can localize the patient's location to the granularity of a particular area of a disaster scene (such as triage area treatment area, decontamination area, warm zone), a particular ambulance the patient, or any hospital that the patient has been admitted into. This tracking process is completely automated. It allows incident commanders to easily keep track of where their patients are.

GPS sensors track patients, providers, and ambulances who are outdoors, e.g. at the scene of the emergency, with accuracy of 3 meters (CEP).

The indoor location system, based on the MoteTrack project developed at Harvard University, requires the installation of location beacons. Indoor location beacons will be installed at a designated auxiliary care center near Washington DC. Patients are admitted to an auxiliary care center if nearby hospitals have reached their occupancy capacities and cannot admit more patients. At an auxiliary care center, which can often be short on staff and overfilled with patients, the patients vital signs will continue to be monitored by our system.