Optimal physiology-aware scheduling of clinical states in rural ambulance transport

Abstract

Remote monitoring in a continuous manner is a key component of ambulance transports for patients with severe diseases. The measurements of the patients, e.g. their heart rate, temperature, level of glucose and many more, should constantly be reported to the hospital with expert doctors to give instructions to people in ambulance so that the patient survives on the way to hospital where more instruments and expert doctors are available in hand. In rural areas, the coverage of communication services are not sufficient for transmission of such signals, so the available bandwidth should be used in an efficient manner, or severe irreparable damages can be caused for the patient. The available bandwidth can come from different sources like satellite communication, 2G/3G/4G communication from different carriers, or other wireless communications available for ambulances specifically. Given that the physiological states of a patient are of different priorities and that the different sources of communications have different bandwidths (and so different round trip time), an important issue is to schedule the right physiological state of the patient to the right communication channel, so that the cost incurred to the patient minimizes. In this paper, we investigate the performance of different scheduling algorithms on our system model, and propose an adaptive communication scheme for remote monitoring of critically ill patients who are receiving ambulance transport in rural areas with poor communication coverage to minimize the instantaneous incurred damage to these patients.