A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the re quirements for the degree of Master of Engineering in Computer Science, School of Engineering and Technology

Thesis (M.Eng.) - Asian Institute of Technology, 2008

The integration of internet and Geographic InfOlmation Systems has revolutionized the way people exchange location-based information with each other in real-time. An emergency response system is considered the most efficient that delivers its service in least amount of time. The traditional emergency-response systems prevailing in hospitals take a lot of time from diagnosis to the treatment of the patient in an emergency like sending ambulances, recording the symptoms of the patients, and getting medical history for deciding the course of action to be taken. The obvious delay increases the probability of losing the life of patients. In this thesis, first an in-depth study of existing pre-hospital emergency services at Khon Kaen hospital in north of Thailand is presented and problems faced by emergency response system are identified. In addition, data related to emergency services and patients is also collected from the hospital. To provide solution to the existing problems in pre-hospital emergency services at Khon Kaen hospital, an internet-based emergency-response system for hospital has been proposed that exchanges real-time incident information among victims, physicians and hospital emergency-response system staff. The heart of the proposed hospital emergency response system is a hospital web site for trauma assistance with enhanced functionality such as web access and infOlmation sharing via mobile PDA. The security enabled website keeps the data base for patient record which can be accessed by the doctors and medical practitioners to handle trauma patients. The proposed system utilizes technologies such as GPS devices and RFID tags to help hospital staff to send well-equipped ambulance that is nearer to the incident location in the least possible time and ensure continuous tracking of patients inside the hospital. The emergency staff utilizes utilize real-time maps to track the incident location and monitor patients continuously. The proposed emergency response system enables real-time exchange of incident information and patient's medical history thus enabling the physician and emergency staff to make appropriate arrangements at the hospital in advance, while the patient is on the way. This saves a great amount of time and ultimately, the life of the patient. This also saves the human resources at the hospital by providing all the information regarding patient's medical history on-line, without pre-operation diagnosis.