IT-Supported Management of Mass Casualty Incidents: The e-Triage Project

Voice, analogue mobile radio, and paper have been successfully used for decades for coordination of emergencies and disasters, but although being simple and robust this approach cannot keep pace with today’s requirements any more. Emerging and established digital communication standards open the door to new applications and services, but the expected benefit needs to be carefully evaluated against robustness, interoperability, and user-friendliness. This paper describes a framework for IT-supported management of mass casualty incidents, which is currently under implementation and study. The four pillars of the concept are handheld devices for use both in daily rescue operations and in disasters, autonomous satellite-based communication infrastructure, a distributed database concept for maximal availability, and psychological acceptance research

Wearable proximity sensors for monitoring a mass casualty incident exercise: a feasibility study

Over the past several decades, naturally occurring and man-made mass casualty incidents (MCI) have increased in frequency and number, worldwide. To test the impact of such event on medical resources, simulations can provide a safe, controlled setting while replicating the chaotic environment typical of an actual disaster. A standardised method to collect and analyse data from mass casualty exercises is needed, in order to assess preparedness and performance of the healthcare staff involved. We report on the use of wearable proximity sensors to measure proximity events during a MCI simulation. We investigated the interactions between medical staff and patients, to evaluate the time dedicated by the medical staff with respect to the severity of the injury of the victims depending on the roles. We estimated the presence of the patients in the different spaces of the field hospital, in order to study the patients' flow. Data were obtained and collected through the deployment of wearable proximity sensors during a mass casualty incident functional exercise. The scenario included two areas: the accident site and the Advanced Medical Post (AMP), and the exercise lasted 3 hours. A total of 238 participants simulating medical staff and victims were involved. Each participant wore a proximity sensor and 30 fixed devices were placed in the field hospital. The contact networks show a heterogeneous distribution of the cumulative time spent in proximity by participants. We obtained contact matrices based on cumulative time spent in proximity between victims and the rescuers. Our results showed that the time spent in proximity by the healthcare teams with the victims is related to the severity of the patient's injury. The analysis of patients' flow showed that the presence of patients in the rooms of the hospital is consistent with triage code and diagnosis, and no obvious bottlenecks were found

A Real Time Web Based Electronic Triage, Resource Allocation and Hospital Dispatch System for Emergency Response

Disasters are characterized by large numbers of victims and required resources, overwhelming the available resources. Disaster response involves various entities like Incident Commanders, dispatch centers, emergency operations centers, area command and hospitals. An effective emergency response system should facilitate coordination between these various entities. Victim triage, emergency resource allocation and victim dispatch to hospitals form an important part of an emergency response system. In this present research effort, an emergency response system with the aforementioned components is developed. Triage is the process of prioritizing mass casualty victims based on severity of injuries. The system presented in this thesis is a low-cost victim triage system with RFID tags that aggregate all victim information within a database. It will allow first responders\u27 movements to be tracked using GPS. A web-based real time resource allocation tool that can assist the Incident Commanders in resource allocation and transportation for multiple simultaneous incidents has been developed. This tool ensures that high priority resources at emergency sites are received in least possible time. This web-based tool also computes the patient dispatch schedule from each disaster site to each hospital. Patients are allocated to nearest hospitals with available medical facilities. This tool can also assist resource managers in emergency resource planning by computing the time taken to receive required resources from the nearest depots using Google Maps. These web-based tools complements emergency response systems by providing decision-making capabilities

A Wearable Platform for Patient Monitoring during Mass Casualty Incidents

Based on physiological data, intelligent algorithms can assist with the classification and recognition of the most severely impaired victims. This dissertation presents a new sensorbased triage platform with the main proposal to join different sensor and communications technologies into a portable device. This new device must be able to assist the rescue units along with the tactical planning of the operation. This dissertation discusses the implementation and the evaluation of the platform

Localization, Visualization And Evacuation Guidance System In Emergency Situations

Urban search and rescue is needed for a variety of emergencies or disasters, including tornadoes, floods, dam failures, technological accidents, and terrorist activities. The efficiency to save people is becoming very important. With the development of the technology, people are trying to find a better way to help people get out of the dangerous places as soon as possible. DIORAMA system has been proposed to help with this problem and turns out very successful on improving efficiency during emergency situation. However, the current DIORAMA system is not perfect for all scenarios, for example, there are some outdoor environments do not support GPS service. Also, the RFID reader is very heavy for responders to carry and the indoor environment is not applicable for DIORAMA system. Besides, there are lack of forensic visualization toolkits that are able to help the incident commander analyze the responders’ behavior and efficiency. In this project, we propose a Localization, Visualization and Evacuation Guidance System in Emergency Situations. The functionalities in this system include localization in outdoor environments using BLE. Besides, for outdoor environments, some forensic visualization toolkit that can help the responder analyze the responders’ behavior with the capability of visualization and representation of data clearly as well as replay the task, detect anomalies and visualize the anomalies clearly is also provided in improving the efficiency and organization in the future task. In addition, the system also includes an indoor localization, navigation guidance and visualization system that provides guidance for people to exit a dangerous building as soon as possible. This system is able to localize the position of evacuees, and construct the exit path that helps reduce the escape time as well as provide a navigation guidance that is able to guide the user to the exit. In addition, an analyst simulation application is provided to simulate the evacuees in a building and evaluate the evacuation time for evacuees given specific path generation algorithm