Wireless Medical Sensor Networks in Emergency Response: Implementation and Pilot Results

Abstract

This project demonstrates the feasibility of using cost- effective, flexible, and scalable sensor networks to address critical bottlenecks of the emergency response process. For years, emergency medical service providers conducted patient care by manually measuring vital signs, documenting assessments on paper, and communicating over handheld radios. When disasters occurred, the large numbers of casualties quickly and easily overwhelmed the responders. Collaboration with EMS and hospitals in the Baltimore Washington Metropolitan region prompted us to develop miTag (medical information tag), a cost- effective wireless sensor platform that automatically track patients throughout each step of the disaster response process, from disaster scenes, to ambulances, to hospitals. The miTag is a highly extensible platform that supports a variety of sensor add-ons - GPS, pulse oximetry, blood pressure, temperature, ECG - and relays data over a self-organizing wireless mesh network Scalability is the distinguishing characteristic of miTag: its wireless network scales across a wide range of network densities, from sparse hospital network deployments to very densely populated mass casualty sites. The miTag system is out-of-the-box operational and includes the following key technologies: 1) cost-effective sensor hardware, 2) self-organizing wireless network and 3) scalable server software that analyzes sensor data and delivers real-time updates to handheld devices and web portals. The system has evolved through multiple iterations of development and pilot deployments to become an effective patient monitoring solution. A pilot conducted with the Department of Homeland Security indicates miTags can increase the patient care capacity of responders in the field A pilot at Washington Hospital showed miTags are capable of reliably transmitting data inside radio-interference-rich critical care settings.