START
Emergency medical response time has sped up considerably since 1797, the year Napoléon's surgeon general declared that soldiers must be transported to a hospital within 24 hours of being wounded. Today, the standard in the US -éwhere 40,000 ambulances respond to half a million 911 calls a day - is eight minutes or less. The most advanced vehicles pack everything from wireless webcams to magnet-controlled respirators. Coming soon: smart bandages. Here's a peek inside a University of Maryland bus.
1. Telemedicine
There may be only one paramedic in the back of each University of Maryland ambulance, but there's a whole team of ER physicians and nurses watching the patient's progress via webcam. The hospital recently outfitted three vehicles with a Northrop Grumman system that combines Wi-Fi and cell bandwidth to form one fat feed. It can transmit 20 Kbits of data per second - enough to zap a series of sharp images to the emergency room.
2. Emergency Chatrooms
Prompted in part by communication failure on 9/11 - paramedics were calling dispatch centers to get in touch with cops 20 yards away - Washington, DC, is building CapWIN, the nation's first wireless multistate emergency network. Set to go live by year's end, the IBM-built system will allow police and rescue squads in DC, Virginia, and Maryland to compare notes during an incident. The encrypted chat rooms will be accessible through PDAs and laptops.
3. Enter the Oxylator
When a patient starts to turn blue, many EMTs rely on the new Oxylator EM-100 instead of the old CPR bag. The device uses a magnet-controlled valve that senses the patient's airflow - or lack thereof. The Oxylator has greatly reduced the problem of multitasking paramedics overfilling patients' lungs. US Special Forces medics have adopted the machine as a standard, and they used it in Afghanistan last year.
4. Smart Bandages
In March, researchers at the University of Rochester began a clinical study of bacteria-sniffing microchip probes. Eventually, they hope to embed a handful of the devices into a single bandage, which would be able to detect specific pathogens like salmonella, listeria, and E. coli. When a probe detects a bug, a small wireless transmitter on top of the dressing will notify an ambulance's onboard computer. Within 5 minutes, medics will know what they're up against.
5. The Sound of Sirens
Since the mid-1960s, electronic sirens have wailed, yelped, and hee-hawed. In New York City, medics have combined all three sounds to create pig- and cowlike noises to steer jaded city dwellers aside. (The Journal of Emergency Medical Services denounced the barnyard effects in 1990.) Lately, companies have been experimenting with wideband noise -éstatic broadcast across several frequencies simultaneously - to help citizens distinguish the blare.
START
signal : noise
The Shape of Things to Come
Nick Denton, Blog Mogul
Why GM Food Could Start a Trade War
The FBI's Candyman Cases Go Sour
Oh, Nooo! What If GPS Fails?
Open Source Spuds
jargon watch
Getting High for Science
3 Ways to Rethink the Pay Phone
The High Priest of the Atari Cult
The Bleeding Edge
Four Ways the FCC Screwed Up
Wired | Tired | Expired
