Physical and digital design of the BlueBio biomonitoring system prototype, to be used in emergency medical response

This paper presents the physical and digital design of a wireless biomonitoring system meant to be used especially in the prehospital medical emergency response. The handling of many patients with a minimum of resources at major incidents is an immense challenge for the emergency personnel at work on an accident site. New technology such as the BlueBio biomonitoring system, can help emergency personnel monitor the patients and support them in making priorities of treatment and transport of patients. However, if new technology is to be introduced in such a complex and stressed situation it must relate to the palpable aspects of pervasive computing. It must be able to comply with the scale of the situation and still be understandable. It must also be able to comply with change of location and users and yet still be stable, and it must comply with the shifting requirements from the users regarding automation and user control. Our design framework, in relation to the BlueBio monitoring system, approaches these challenges from the perspective of familiarity, medical assessment and person ID/registration of data. We present how this informs and has implications for both the physical and digital design of the current prototype