FPGA Based Wireless Emergency Medical System for Developing Countries

Abstract

In developing countries like India the translational gap between research development & implementation to routine clinical applications is high. To bridge this gap, a research methodology related to the development of emergency medical system & implementation of pre-hospital care is proposed. In order to provide comfort & convenience to first responders & paramedics, system is highly portable due to its light-weight The present work explores the use of low cost FPGA-based medical system in emergency medical situations where high processing speed is required. The design system incorporates the FPGA, user interface components and wireless connectivity is provided with an extra module. Xilinx's Spartan 3E starter kit by Digilent is chosen for the development of proposed medical system. FPGA-based designs offer a lot of flexibility in terms of updating the system & can be transformed to larger and newer FPGAs as the market demands. The proposed system can become one of the major constituents of the EMS (Emergency Medical Services) as it has the unique feature of monitoring multiple EKG waveforms which is not available in conventional hardware design [1].