A Personal Medical Digital Assistant Agent for Supporting Human Operators in Emergency Scenarios

In this paper we present Trauma Tracker, a project – in cooperation with the Trauma Center of a hospital in Italy – in which agent technologies are exploited to realise Personal Medical Digital Assistant Agents (PMDA) supporting a Trauma Team in trauma management operations. This project aims at exploring the fruitful integration of software personal agents with wearable/eyewear computing, based on mobile and wearable devices such as smart-glasses. The key functionality of Trauma Tracker is to keep track of relevant events occurring during the management of a trauma, for different purposes. The basic one – discussed in detail in this paper – is to have an accurate documentation of the trauma, to automate the creation (and management) of reports and to enable offline data analysis, useful for performance evaluation and to improve the work of the Trauma Team. Then, tracking is essential to conceive more involved assisting functionalities by the PMDA, from monitoring and warning generation to suggesting actions to perform—fully exploiting the hands-free interface of wearable technologies. This goes towards the idea – envisioned in the paper – of augmented physicians working in augmented hospitals, in which software personal agents are exploited along with enabling technologies from wearable and pervasive computing, augmented reality, to create novel smart environments to support individual and cooperative work of healthcare professionals.