Live video from ambulance to ED
Attention editors of technology and general-interest publications: Hospitals & Health Networks this month has a short InBox item I wrote about live video links from ambulances to emergency departments and trauma centers. Emergency medical services in Tucson, Ariz., and, more recently, Baton Rouge, La., make use of municipal Wi-Fi networks to triage and diagnose trauma cases before patients even arrive.
This is a story I’ve known about for more than a year and a half and only recently, when Baton Rouge turned the first piece of what soon will be a parish-wide system, did any editor, HHN Senior Editor Matthew Weinstock, show interest in this story. All he had the room or budget for was this 450-word InBox item, though.
If you believe the telemedicine experts I interviewed, this kind of technology may become the norm in urban and suburban areas within a few years, and that, IMHO, makes it worth a much longer feature story in a publication that reaches beyond healthcare. There was some MSM coverage of the Baton Rouge launch, but nothing that examined the big picture.
I toured an ambulance and got a live demonstration of the technology when I was in Tucson in February, and have leads on other municipalities that are considering such a system, plus some cities that are using different technologies to achieve the same results. I’ve got photos, too.
Editors, I await your call.
Dear Neil,This is indeed an interesting application area. However, for the population at large, the deployment of municipal wifi networks is somewhat limited and there may often be significant coverage gaps. Also, it would be nice to have constant video coverage, and not only when there is proximity to a Wi-Fi access point.For this reason, we believe bonding, or combining, of multiple wireless 3G cellular modems, offers a practical and valuable solution to this application area. Currently, for example, it is commonly possible to get uplink speeds in the 100s of kilobytes per second range from a single carrier. By concurrently combining the services of multiple carriers which are commonly available in many areas (e.g. Sprint, ATT, Verizon, T-Mobile), a faster and more reliable data pipe is created. For example, it is commonly possible to obtain data rates in the several hundreds of kilobits/sec, and even higher, with fairly small latencies.For details, see http://www.mushroomnetworks.com/product.aspx?product_id=1003&tab=featuresIn the future, we may also consider supporting the bonding of 3G wireless links with Wi-Fi links, so that both types of technology can be used.Best wishes,The team at Mushroom Networks