Nonprofit to apply telematics to emergency response

This is the belief of a Washington-based nonprofit called the ComCARE Alliance (www.comcare.org), a coalition of professionals from the medical, telecommunications, automotive, and emergency-response fields. I spoke with Christopher A. McLean, counsel for the organization.

Although I usually resist preannouncing products and services that aren't yet available, I'll make an exception in this case, because the services are intended to save lives and reduce the severity of injuries.

The services to be provided by ComCARE fall into the bucket of the Automatic Crash Notification (ACN) system, a catchall term for the aggregation of medical and emergency information. The goal of ACN is to provide emergency-response professionals and emergency-room doctors with sophisticated crash information that will help a medical team evaluate the nature and possible severity of injuries even before they see the patient.

The system will use telematics to send out data on the speed of the vehicle at the time of the crash, the angle of collision, whether the vehicle rolled over, the number of passengers, and each passenger's weight, to name a few of the data fields.

Taking these bits of data, Dr. Jeffrey Augenstein, professor of surgery and director of the William Lehman Injury Research Center at the University of Miami, has created an "urgency algorithm" that tries to determine the type of injuries emergency units may be presented with when patients arrive on the scene. They might be forewarned of possible spleen injury, head injury, or internal bleeding.

The aggregated data will produce a detailed checklist for emergency-room professionals.

Part of the ComCARE Alliance is a for-profit company called GlobalMedNet, which runs a service that stores and forwards emergency medical information worldwide (www.globalmednet.net). By the way, the companies involved in the ComCARE alliance are both nonprofits and for-profits, including the Big Three automakers, the Computer Telephony and Internet Association, and Qualcomm.

In the future, thanks to companies such as GlobalMedNet, an emergency team will know your baseline EKG, what medicines you are taking, possible allergic reactions, and so on. If, for example, you're on beta blockers that affect your blood pressure, this vital data will be available to the emergency-room team.

GM's OnStar wireless service offers the GlobalMedNet service in their basic and premier packages. Users fill out a medical history and the service makes it available wherever you are, in 19 languages, to any one of 6,500 hospitals with emergency medical care in the United States, for example. If you don't have OnStar, the service costs $79.95 per year, with unlimited medical updates.

Unfortunately, GobalMedNet is not wireless-enabled, nor does it offer a Web site service. It operates only via fax, which I am told are in some ambulances. But Internet and wireless access is coming.

OnStar isn't perfect either, mind you. It sends out an automated alert if a front or side airbag is deployed; however, it does not send out alerts for any other kind of impact. These must be user-initiated. In addition, OnStar operates off the battery; so if during a front-end collision the battery cables are severed, there's no alert.

Thiss story isn't perfect, but it is certainly improving. Thanks to wireless, emergency teams will be able to get to you quicker and know more about how to treat you when they arrive.