An Architectural Framework for Implementing Integrated Ambulance System in Smart City

Abstract

Growing population in the cities demands smart ways of city management. To e ciently manage and distribute city resources, Smart City concept has gained importance among the governments all over the world. This concept refers to the use of Information and Communication Technologies for the provision of administrative facilities. Smart Living is a major component of Smart City. It involves the Smart Healthcare facilities for the citizens via using Smart Applications. In developing countries like Pakistan, timely Patient Transformation to the hospitals is a major problem. Conventional System used in Patient Transformation wastes a lot of time which may not be appropriate in the critical situations. Lack of communication between ambulance drivers and control rooms, poor internet connectivity in remote areas, less or no mechanism for continuous ambulance monitoring, non- availability of drivers performance indicators, lack of house numbering mechanism in rural areas and time wastage in conventional Patient Referral System are the major challenges faced by the district administration. An Architectural Framework for Integrated Ambulance Systems in Smart City is being proposed in this thesis. This proposed architecture tends to resolve all above mentioned problems in the conventional ambulance management system. Application Layer, Communication Layer, Information Layer and Stakeholders Layer are the main building layers of the proposed Layered Architecture. The proposed solution includes set of Web and Android applications, developed for the interaction and e ective communication between control room and integrated ambulance. Web application is used by the control room agents which allows them to add emergency details which are directly visible on the android application, installed in a tablet in ambulance. Control room can view live status and location of the ambulance. Ambulance application provides complete task details to drivers, along with the route to patients exact Geolocation and the hospital location. Our proposed system can continue its operations even with no internet connectivity. For this purpose, a Backup Routing server has been introduced, which uses SMS service to transfer the data between applications. A web application, has also been introduced to avoid the time wastage in a conventional patient referral system, where patient is referred to a higher level hospital in case of non-availability of the resources in basic hospital. This system generates SMS alerts to the referred hospital sta for the intimation of new patients arrival having a certain disease or injury. City Administration can have executive view of the system via graphical user Dashboard. Reports related to the ambulance task history and patient referral are also visible to the city administration.