AmbuLink: Communication System for Doctors and Ambulance Crews

Rice University engineering students are helping a Houston hospital develop a more reliable way to keep in contact with inbound ambulance crews. The AmbuLink team worked closely with Texas Children's Hospital over the past year on a system that bridges gaps between cellular service signals and streams audio and, when necessary, video, from the ambulance to doctors and dispatchers. The students have assembled laptops, cellular modems, a camera, and wireless headsets into a suite that allows emergency medical technicians to keep their hands free while communicating important information back to base. The students' primary challenge was to write, refine, and test the software that allows all the pieces to work seamlessly and synchronize signals from three cellular providers. They see AmbuLink as a multiyear project that will ultimately feed data about a patient's vital signs directly into a hospital's health database, where doctors can access all the essentials before the patient arrives.

Transcript

00:00:00 [Music] in the Emergency Center specifically we deal with prehospital a lot so not just the kangaroo crew but you know hfd other prehospital entities and a lot of that communication is via cell phone so they're calling the emergency room they're talking to us we basically were like there's got to be a better way there's got to be a way to improve the

00:00:27 connectivity you're going to first establish the connection to the server into the hospital we're Team ulink our partners Texas Children's Hospital and the kangaroo crew have identified a need for a system that allows their transport team to speak with their dispatch teams on standby in their Hospital in route with the transport with the patient this is

00:00:53 what would actually exist for the transport team our system what does is allows for the those particular transport team members to be sitting in the back with the patient handsfree so they can focus their full attention on the patient but also have the entire wealth of resources of the physicians at the hospital immediately at their disposal right here on their headset all

00:01:16 right good sup Bud yeah of course awesome this thing works I just want to point that out and so the concept is this is that an EMT takes his headset and puts it on while they're working around in the ambulance there are very few buttons that need to be pushed in order to stop and start audio due to the way that we've set up the data it's very robust and it resists cell dropouts and

00:01:38 other problems and all in all it's a very clear and Powerful system that allows the EMT to focus on treating the patient this is ambulance hail to base we have left left o and our in route to TCH Roger that what's your status over we may not act as well as we engineer I hate to say it it's using three but the it can have as many as you want as many connections as you can pay

00:02:06 for we are utilizing also is streaming currently over all three modems hey all three modems at once that's fantastic it will support all of those and use them all for transmitting the data we want another video over here go ahead and send one out okay the first part is going to be me then it's that's fine we'll settle how to drive like a cool guy it was

00:02:27 something that was novel but also something that was surprising inly practical where they just use cellular feeds to give us a really good data flow so that we can get the right amount of information back and forth M Audio is now on yeah so now I'm talking to someone let's say I'm not getting any feedback from the provider in the hospital and want to get their attention

00:02:48 I basically hit the alert button MH and it was really the human engineering that made it more powerful where they took the things that we needed and engineered switches and buttons that simplified the whole process that we might not have gotten from a a million dooll corporation that really might not be getting our input they might have just built something purely from a technical

00:03:09 standpoint and then given it to us with like 20 buttons for us to push to get the same Solution on the other end