Emergency medical service (EMS) providers routinely lack even basic access to pre-existing patient information when delivering patient care in the field. Improving access to pre-existing patient information could improve the quality, safety and efficiency of care that they can deliver. EMS providers in Indianapolis use an electronic record to document their care. In order to provide access to p...

Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in developing personalized and nonhospital based care systems to improve the management of cardiac care. The EPI-MEDICS project has designed an intelligent, portable Personal ECG Monitor (PEM) embedding an advanced decision making system. We present two of the ambient intelligence models embedded in the PEM: the neural-network based ischemia detect...

that century. Lazaro's piece is the only one dealing with psychiatry outside the AngloFranco-Germanic world, and it also makes clear that Spanish history operates on a very different time line from the north-west of Europe. A cursory view of the remainder of the south and east of Europe calls into question whether the traditional history of psychiatry, focusing on the north-west, applies outsid...

A postal survey of staff (doctors, nurses, midwives, health visitors, therapy professionals, senior managers and clinical audit staff) was conducted in three English hospital and community healthcare providers. The aim was to assess staff perceptions of the impact of local clinical audit programmes and to investigate differences between staff groups. The questionnaire contained a 24 item opinio...

BACKGROUND Although a common first aid topic, emergency tourniquets to stop bleeding are controversial because there is little experience on which to guide use. Absent an adequate historical analysis, we have researched development of emergency tourniquets from antiquity to the present. METHODS We selected sources emphasizing historical development of tourniquets from books and databases such...

The present study examined the contribution of physical pathology, pain-related fear and catastrophizing cognitions to pain intensity and disability in 100 patients with non-specific low back pain. Self-report instruments were completed as part of the intake procedure of patients, while physical pathology was quantified from medical charts using the MEDICS procedure. Results of the multiple reg...

"Recommendations for the management of crush victims in mass disasters" aims to assist medics, paramedics and rescue team members who provide care during disasters. Development of the recommendations followed an explicit process of literature review and, also internet and face-to-face discussions. The chapters cover medical and logistic measures, to be taken both at the disaster field and in th...

In the spring of 1998, the Board of the Faculty of Biology of the University of Cambridge sanctioned a project to transform a long-standing traditional course in Medical Sociology, delivered to the first-year undergraduate medics, into a stand-alone computer-aided learning (CAL) package. The course consisted of 10 hour-long lectures, a number of tutorials (known in Cambridge as ‘supervisions’) ...

CAVE-like displays allow a user to walk in to a virtual environment, and use natural movement to change the viewpoint of virtual objects which they can manipulate with a hand held device. This maps well to many surgical procedures offering strong potential for training and planning. These devices may be networked together allowing geographically remote users to share the interactive experience....

There is a pressing need in the military for a system that interprets data from a suite of wearable physiological sensors to infer a soldier's current clinical state on the battlefield. The Warfighter Physiological Status Monitoring (WPSM) concept is envisioned by the US Army to address this need. Life sign detection is a key component. The future WPSM system will consist of a body-worn network...