The design of a decentralized electronic triage system.

The Advanced Health and Disaster Aid Network (AID-N) project seeks to identify unmet needs of emergency response teams in the Washington, DC area during mass casualty incidents and conduct feasibility tests of technology-based solutions. The decentralized electronic triage and sensing system uses low power, electronic triage sensors to monitor the vital signs of patients and provide location tracking capabilities. The robust, decentralized location tracking software runs on a small, embedded system with limited memory and computational power that efficiently locates patients. A field study demonstrates the process of current emergency procedures and the design implications of the prototype. This field study, along with the hardware and software architecture of the electronic triage system, lay the foundation for a reliable, decentralized sensor deployment that will continuously extend network coverage during a mass casualty incident.