PERVASIVE COMPUTING LABORATORY
July, 2005
Maria Salas, eight months pregnant, is seriously injured in an evening freeway accident. Sensors in the car automatically emit an emergency beacon containing GPS coordinates, which alerts public safety personnel of a likely accident requiring response. Initially, highway patrol and a tow truck are dispatched.
Jim Brown, a former Army medic, stops to help. Seeing Maria, he uses his wristwatch to call 911 and begin a conversation with the emergency operator while sprinting back to his car to retrieve the broadband wireless PDA laying on the seat. Jim transfers his ongoing 911 conversation from his watch to his PDA as he returns to Maria, because the PDA has bi-directional video support lacking in the watch.
The PDA also has a personal area network transceiver, which is used to discover and communicate with a medical alert chip inserted in Maria's arm early in her pregnancy. This data is forwarded to the 911 operator, who decides to dispatch additional medical emergency and rescue resources. The medical alert data is also used to identify and contact Maria's physician.
Jill Hughes, an obstetrician at University Medical Center, is taking
an evening stroll along a trail in the nearby mountains.
About one mile out from her car, her watch chimes urgently. Glancing at
the display, she sees that a patient has been injured and reaches into
her pocket to pull out her PDA and instantaneously transfer the messaging
session from the watch to the PDA. A PDA-based application retrieves medical
history data about Maria as Dr. Hughes jogs back to her car.
As she begins driving towards the Medical Center, her PDA session is transferred to her car computer, which includes a powerful processor, display, and voice-recognition system. This system retrieves a range of image and video data from Maria's medical records at Dr. Hughes' request. When her car passes into the city limits, network support is transparently switched from the wide-area network provider that serviced her communications in the mountains, to a metropolitan-area network provider. The Medical Center computing infrastructure notices the switchover, and adjusts the quality of the image data it sends to Dr. Hughes.
Dr. Hughes now joins a video-conferencing session with the 911 operator, hospital emergency room staff, Jim Brown, and rescue personnel still struggling through traffic to arrive on scene. With guidance from the emergency room trauma team and Dr. Hughes, Jim conducts a brief examination of Maria and is able to apply limited, but patient-appropriate life-support measures until the rescue team arrives. Once on scene, the rescue team takes over. Jim transfers his PDA session to one of the rescuers' computing tablets, and withdraws from the situation.
Dr. Hughes arrives at the Medical Center and as she enters the parking
garage, her computation/com\munication session
automatically transfers back to her PDA, which has a much higher bandwidth
connection available to it when on campus. She remains in contact with
all participants while walking down the hall, and clarifies a point for
an emergency medical technician treating Maria. While waiting for the
elevator, she consults further chart details and enters some additional
notes. As she enters the emergency room, she transfers her PDA session
to a system that includes a wall-mounted display bank where she is able
to show the most important data concerning Maria to the entire trauma
team. The transferred session includes partially completed progress notes
not yet formally saved in the patient records database.
Maria and her rescuers arrive at the emergency room at about the same time as Dr. Hughes. The trauma team and Dr. Hughes are ready for her, and already know 95% of what they need to do to heal her and save her unborn child. In fact, the rescue team has already begun critical steps under the joint guidance of the trauma team and Dr. Hughes.
This scenario was inspired in part by a segment
of Bill Gates' November, 1994 COMDEX multimedia presentation, Information
at your Fingertips 2005.
