Emergency scenarios with many casualties tend to be chaotic and stressful for the emergency personnel involved. Accurate information about the situation is all important to provide efficient coordination of treatment and evacuation of the injured. This is true for all emergency services involved; health, police and fire. There is an acute need to gather and share information about the overall situation at the site of an accident, and about the status of individual patients; their need for medical resources and their transport-status.
Today, information about individual patients is usually recorded on paper forms accompanying the patients, and all exchange of important information is done using ad hoc voice communication by radio between the many actors involved; police-, health- and fire-personnel at the scene of the accident and coordinators at the emergency dispatch centres. This can, and often does, lead to misunderstandings, poor information flow and difficulty in forming an overall picture of the status at the scene.
SINTEF ICT has long been involved in research and development of next-generation solutions for emergency information and communication systems, for both civilian and military scenarios. The solutions include adhoc wireless networks, electronic medical tags attached to the casualties, robust handheld terminals and applications tuned to the job at hand. The objective is robust identification of the patients, and efficient registration and replication of core emergency data to all actors involved.
SINTEF ICT projects:FieldCare: an internally financed project which focuses on the development of a system demonstrator for data capture and information flow between personnel involved in a medical emergency.
Evacuation Support System: development , testing and evaluation of a evacuation support system for medical information flow through the military medical evacuation chain. A collaboration project between Norwegian and US military authorities.
Wireless Health and Care: Demonstration of how wireless solutions can aid health care in various scenarios; SINTEFs work is focused on large scale emergencies. The project is part-financed by the Norwegian Research Council.
