Paramedics transporting patients to the hospital typically brief hospital staff once the ambulance arrives. But in a 5G-connected ambulance, emergency crews will be able to collect critical patient data and share it with the hospital in real time, even before they arrive. Emergency doctors and nurses will then be better prepared to receive the patient, which means a smoother, more efficient handover process.
Ambulance operations are an essential part of the emergency services and over the past few decades have become increasingly advanced, featuring a significant number of fairly high-tech medical equipment and devices. With the widespread roll-out of 5G wireless communications networks, however, these traditional ambulances could soon make way for 5G connected ambulances.
In practise, connected Ambulance will act as a connection hub for the emergency medical equipment and wearables, enabling storing and real-time streaming of patient data to the awaiting emergency department team at the destination hospital. The continuous collection and streaming of patient data will begin when the emergency ambulance paramedics arrive at the incident scene right up until the delivery of the patient to the emergency department at the destination hospital. It shall also be noted that all data streams shall be reasonably synchronised in order to be able to correlate monitoring events and images and to enable recording and offline synchronized playback of the intervention. This is achieved through the synchronisation of all equipment having 5G connectivity inside the ambulance (camera, microphone, medical systems …) on the same global clock provided by the 5G system.
Typically those connected ambulances, today usually equipped with echographers, could be equipped in the medium term with portable CT (Computed Tomography) and x-ray scanners, high definition video camera, or even portable MRI scanners so that doctors in the Emergency Room Centre (ERC) can 'see' the patient via high definition visual connection and for example order a CT scan of the patient's head.
The 5G connection shall be reliable, stable and in a conservative approach we mandate all medical data to be transmitted with a high priority and with a very low probability to consecutively violate service defined constraints for the duration of the journey to the hospital.
There has been important car accident on the M11 North East of London close to Coopersale exit at the end of the afternoon (5pm). Involved vehicles are obstructing the traffic thus rapidly leading to severe congestion and long waiting times.
Sue is returning home after her working day and is driving over the speed limit at this location. When she realizes that all vehicles in front of her are all stopped on the road, she hits the brakes. Her car goes onto a skid and onto the unimproved shoulder and rolls over. In this process Sue hits her head on the windshield and passes out.
People that are witnessing the scene call the London Ambulance Service that decides to dispatch a connected ambulance on site. The Emergency Room Center (ERC) and a local MNO have a business contract in place by which the ERC can ask the MNO (through suitable APIs) to allocate the necessary high priority resources fulfilling SLAs suitable to the transport of medical data (with special care taken on medical data integrity and confidentiality) over a geographical area covering the site of the accident and the route from that site to the hospital.
Each needed equipment in the connected ambulance (ultrasound probe, monitoring scopes, CT and X-Ray scanners…) is:
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Powered up,
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Subscribed to 5G communication services fulfilling agreed SLAs,
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Attached to the local MNO 5G network,
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Provisioned with parameters allowing establishment of a secure communication link to an authenticated application in the ERC and/or hospital in charge of sharing incident data with the authorized personnel