DEVELOPMENT OF BIOTELEMETRY SYSTEM FOR ADVANCED EMERGENCY CARE IN AMBULANCE

Koichi Shimizu, Seiji Matsuda, Isao Saito, Katsuyuki Yamamoto and Takeshi Hatsuda*
Graduate School of Engineering, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, 060, Japan
* Hokkaido Institute of Technology, Sapporo, 006, Japan

INTRODUCTION In the medical emergency out of a hospital, the patient has to be diagnosed properly and transported to an appropriate medical institution as quick as possible. To improve the lifesaving rate in emergency medicine, there has been a strong demand for the medical care in a moving vehicle such as and ambulance and passenger vehicles. In Japan, the licensed paramedic is legally requested to get a concrete instruction from a medical doctor to conduct advanced lifesaving operations. To answer this demand, we have applied a biotelemetry technique with the recent technology to the emergency radio communication system.

METHOD Fig.1 illustrates the principle of this technique. The appearance of the patient is caught with a CCD camera. Color still pictures are transmitted and each scene is renewed every 20-80 seconds. The vital sign, such as an ECG and a blood oxygen level are sampled, digitized and multiplexed in a personal computer. They are fed to the transmitter through a modem. The signals are transmitted to a central fire station using an emergency radio link or a mobile telephone network. At the fire station, the wireless communication channel is connected to a wire telephone line. In the hospital, a medical doctor can grasp the situation with the color image and monitor the vital signs of the patient in a real time. With these information, the doctor sends the necessary instructions to a paramedic through a vocal communication channel.

RESULTS In the experiment in the moving ambulance, the feasibility of this technique was verified. In the regular condition of the communication link, the stability of signal transmission was reasonably well. The fidelity of the transmitted signal was satisfactory for the use of an emergency medicine.