Internet of Things in Emergency Medical Care and Services

Abstract

Emergency care is a critical area of medicine whose outcomes are influenced by the time, availability, and accuracy of contextual information. In addition, the success of emer- gency care depends on the quality and accuracy of the information received during the emergency call and data collected during the emergency transportation. The success of a follow medical treatment at an emergency care unit depends too on data collected dur- ing the two phases: emergency call and transport. However, most information received during an emergency-call is inaccurate and the process of information collection, storage, processing, and retrieval, during an emergency-transportation, is remaining manual and time-consuming. Emergency doctors mostly lack patient’s health records and base the medical treatment on a set of collected information including information provided by the patient or his relatives. Hence, the emergency care delivery is more patient-centered than patient-centric information. Wireless body area network and Internet of Technology (IoT) enable accurate collection of data and are increasingly used in medical applications. This chapter discusses the challenges facing the emergency medical care services deliv- ery, especially in the developing countries. It presents and discusses an IoT platform for a patient-centric-information-based emergency care services delivery. The study is focused on a case of road traffic injury. Results of conducted experiments are discussed.