Today's state-of-the-art medical vests and shirts for health status monitoring are inflexible and expensive. The high cost and the lack of flexibility and integral-unity of the current vests are prohibiting factors for their use in first responder applications. The vests also lack an in-built intelligence to accurately determine the health status of the person wearing the vest. We present a hardware plus software solution for monitoring the health status of first responders in pressurized and adversarial missions. The technology consists of two main components. The first component is a physiological vest consisting of a suite of physiological sensors interfaced with energy management units designed to prolong the life of the sensors. The sensors communicate wirelessly with a personal server consisting of a Decision Support Software (DSS), which forms the second major component of our technology. The DSS (1) integrates the physiologic sensors readings for global assessment of the individual's health status; (2) recommends medical Alerts and Actions based on the fusion of the sensor readings; and (3) applies cognitive computation to personalize the medical vest to the specific physiologic and motion characteristics of the individual wearing the vest, in the theater of the operation or during exercise.

Date Published: 24 April 2009
PDF: 8 pages
Proc. SPIE 7313, Smart Biomedical and Physiological Sensor Technology VI, 73130Q (24 April 2009); doi: 10.1117/12.820287

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 7313:
Smart Biomedical and Physiological Sensor Technology VI
Brian M. Cullum; D. Marshall Porterfield, Editor(s)