AMBtalk: A Cardiovascular IoT Device for Ambulance Applications

Acute Coronary Syndrome (ACS) and other heart emergency events require immediate chest pain identification in the ambulance. Specifically, early identification and triage is required so that patients with chest pain can be quickly sent to a hospital with appropriate care facilities for treatment. In the traditional approach, ambulance personnel often use symptom checklists to examine the patient and make a quick decision for the target hospital. However, not every hospital has specialist facilities to handle such emergency cases. If the result of the subsequent cardiac enzyme test performed at the target hospital strongly suggests the occurrence of myocardial infarction, the patient may need to be sent to another hospital with specialist facilities, such as Percutaneous Coronary Intervention. The standard procedure is time consuming, which may result in delayed treatment and reduce patent survival rate. To resolve this issue, we propose AMBtalk (Ambulance Talk) for accurate, early ACS identification in an ambulance. AMBtalk provides real-time connection to hospital resources, which reduces the elapsed time for treatment, and therefore, improves the patient survival rate. The key to success for AMBtalk is the development of the AllCheck(®) Internet of Things (IoT) device, which can accurately and quickly provide cardiovascular parameter values for early ACS identification. The interactions between the AllCheck(®) IoT device, the emergency medical service center, the ambulance personnel and the hospital are achieved through the AMBtalk IoT server in the cloud network. AllCheck(®) outperforms the existing cardiovascular IoT device solutions for ambulance applications. The testing results of the AllCheck(®) device show 99% correlation with the results of the hospital reports. Due to its excellent performance in quick ACS identification, the AllCheck(®) device was awarded the 17th Taiwan Innovators Award in 2020.