Mobile Agents in Healthcare, a Distributed Intelligence Approach - Computational Intelligence in Healthcare: Advanced Methodologies - page 63

5 The Mobile Agent Electronic Triage Tag (MAETT)

5.1 Introduction

Once an emergency occurs, the task of the first responder medical personnel arriving to
the scene is triageing the victims they find [39] [18]. The triage consists of a protocol
to sort victims according to their medical status in order to prioritize their needs for
receiving medical attention. When all the victims are triaged, the medical personnel
begins to treat them following the color-based prioritization.
The triage of the victims is an important issue to take into account and the imple-
mentation through electronic means must meet certain requirements:

- Data from the triage of the victims cannot be lost and its integrity must be guaran-
teed.
- The time spent to enter the victim information in the mobile device should be as
short as possible and must not exceed the time to do it in the traditional triage.
- The triage must be possible under any condition, whether or not there are network
or other technical conditions. In addition, the device must be shielded from with-
stand water, blood, or other fluids which may be in contact with them at the scene
of the accident.
- The information should reach the control center, where the emergency is managed,
as soon as possible to prepare the required resources for the victims attention on
their arrival.

In this section, a system for the electronic triage of the victims using mobile agents
[31,32] is explained.

5.2 Background

5.2.1 Introduction
This section describes and analyzes the main protocols for triaging victims in large scale
emergency situations. Both, manual and electronic systems are discussed.

5.2.2 Traditional Victims Triage
At present there are different victims triage protocols, the most common protocol used
is the START [15]. The protocol consists of the steps depicted in Figure 5. The whole
procedure does not take more than 60 seconds for each victim.
As it can be seen in Figure 5 four colors are used to differentiate the possible states
of the victim.

- Green color identifies the victim as delayed or low priority.
- Yellow color identifies the victim as urgent priority.
- Red color identifies the victim as immediate priority.
- Black color identifies the victim as deceased.

The triage protocol and the color labels provide an effective visual classification that
allows the medical personnel to easily identify the victims which require more urgent
attention. The protocol steps are described below: