Frontline medics operate under fire, at night, with limited resources and overwhelming patient loads. Developing digital and hardware solutions that directly support first-aid and battlefield casualty care is crucial.
From wireless biosensors and real-time vital sign monitoring to automated triage tools and ruggedized data systems, a lot can be done to further innovations that enhance speed, accuracy, and survivability in combat medical response scenarios.
And we have one challenge in particular that needs addressing:
The Challenge
“Develop a wireless bio-medical sensor that can transmit blood pressure metrics to the Digital Triage Management (DTM) system.“
We have partnered with The AO, a Berlin-based startup that is presently developing a digital triage management system that can replace the photocopied paper card used for TCCC reporting on the Ukrainian battlefield (and elsewhere).
In year four of the full-scale invasion in Ukraine, frontline medics work at night (to minimise the risk of drones), and evacuate a day’s worth of soldiers all at once. This means they are forced to transport five times the number of soldiers than their ambulance teams are equipped to handle. The process is chaotic, and important data is lost.
A digital reporting system in which vital signs information is captured automatically from multiple soldiers (via multiple sensors) and transmitted wirelessly to a TCCC card interface on a digital tablet will make the reporting process more efficient, but will also allow medics to develop data sets and libraries, which can be interpreted using machine learning and artificial intelligence.
The tablet interface The AO has built is designed to capture, display, and eventually interpret key vital sign information, specifically: Pulse, Temperature, Oxygen Saturation (SpO2), and Blood Pressure.
Blood Pressure metrics are very difficult to capture without the traditional use of a pressure cuff. The goal of the hackathon is to develop a prototype sensor that can be easily applied to a patient and transmit the systolic and diastolic blood pressure readings from the sensor to the tablet interface.
Solving this problem is a very big deal.
Teams from the Fraunhofer Institutes in Germany and VTT in Finland will bring their flexible smart patch technologies to the European Defense Tech Hackathon in Copenhagen and make them available to hackers who will try to solve this problem.