GPS and GPRS Based Telemonitoring System for Emergency Patient Transportation

Telemonitoring during the golden hour of patient transportation helps to improve medical care. Presently there are different physiological data acquisition and transmission systems using cellular network and radio communication links. Location monitoring systems and video transmission systems are also commercially available. The emergency patient transportation systems uniquely require transmission of data pertaining to the patient, vehicle, time of the call, physiological signals (like ECG, blood pressure, a body temperature, and blood oxygen saturation), location information, a snap shot of the patient, and voice. These requirements are presently met by using separate communication systems for voice, physiological data, and location that result in a lot of inconvenience to the technicians, maintenance related issues, in addition to being expensive. This paper presents design, development, and implementation of such a telemonitoring system for emergency patient transportation employing ARM 9 processor module. This system is found to be very useful for the emergency patient transportation being undertaken by organizations like the Emergency Management Research Institute (EMRI).