Each year, there are around 40,000 emergency ambulance dispatches in Region Zealand. The sudden serious and often complex health problems could for example be convulsions, strokes (cerebral blood clots and cerebral hemorrhages) or serious injuries in connection with, among other things, traffic accidents or accidents at the workplace or at home.
For these types of emergencies, time is an absolutely decisive and critical factor in whether the patient will recover afterwards, and in a geographical area such as Zealand, many emergencies occur far away from the specialized treatment at the hospital.
Collaboration
With the project ”5G emergency-medical IT health bridge” we at DTU Electro are collaborating with Zealand University Hospital and University of Lund to investigate, whether it is possible to jointly develop a project to upgrade the teledata communication, so it will become possible to send large amounts of data, e.g. scan images, from the ambulance to the hospital. This would allow the commencement of a complex treatment already in the ambulance, thus saving valuable time for the patient.
1st of June was the first day that ambulance 3881 from Falck in Næstved drove around with a network scanner from DTU Electro. This was the initial exercise towards mapping the strength of the network in the region.
Goals
Upgrading to 5G teledata communication is specifically about developing a secure, reliable and stable data connection that supports large amounts of data in the form of telemedicine with video and sound over distances.
The upgrade will allow transfer of patient data, including data from data-heavy scans from ambulances to the region's servers, simultaneously allowing dialogue between specialists, practitioners and possibly patients, and complex treatment can begin already in the ambulance.
Region Zealand states “the main goal of this project is to find the right collaboration partners to upgrade and develop the digitization of health data between on-call doctor, ambulance and hospital” (an emergency-medical IT health bridge).