STREMS: A Smart Real-Time Solution toward Enhancing EMS Prehospital Quality

Emergency medical service (EMS) systems are public services that provide quick response, transportation as well as appropriate emergency medical care to the emergent patient. For EMS, every second is critical. Unfortunately, current EMS systems have many challenges: lack effective communication between EMS providers and hospital professionals, less attention on care quality and limited resources of medical equipment and personnel. Motivated by this, in this paper, we explore the use of wearable sensing, smart mobile device as well as video technology to propose STREMS: an efficient smart real-time prehospital communication system for EMS. Specifically, we first introduce a cost-effective wearable physiological sensing solution to support multi-dimensional telemetry monitoring for an ambulance operating at as Basic Life Support, a type of EMS service level without sophisticated medical equipment or paramedics. Then we propose to build a cloud-based real-time data sharing platform, enabling automated streaming all gathered prehospital data (e.g., vital signs, EKG and image/short videos about accident scene) to the hospital prior to ambulance arrival, thus giving a more complete figure about the incoming patient. This can significantly decrease the handoff time and improve the efficiency at the hospital. Additionally, a live point to point video communication is proposed to support EMS telemedicine to enhance prehospital care quality through directly video conversation to assist EMS providers in consultation, triage, early medical examination and treatment. We implemented STREMS as an Android mobile app and evaluated its feasibility over the broadband cellular network in the city of Detroit. In a moving context, our results demonstrate STREMS can successfully deliver 100% of emergency data to the hospital in less than 1.5s, on average 0.75s for reporting a new case and 0.05s for health data. As the live video with 1280×720 pixel resolution, STREMS only works when the vehicle speed is less than 40MPH.