Overview of Wearable Healthcare Devices for Clinical Decision Support in the Prehospital Setting

Abstract

Prehospital medical care is a major challenge for both civilian and military situations as resources are limited, yet critical triage and treatment decisions must be rapidly made. Prehospital medicine is further complicated during mass casualty situations or remote applications that require more extensive medical treatments to be monitored. It is anticipated on the future battlefield where air superiority will be contested that prolonged field care will extend to as much 72 h in a prehospital environment. Traditional medical monitoring is not practical in these situations and, as such, wearable sensor technology may help support prehospital medicine. However, sensors alone are not sufficient in the prehospital setting where limited personnel without specialized medical training must make critical decisions based on physiological signals. Machine learning-based clinical decision support systems can instead be utilized to interpret these signals for diagnosing injuries, making triage decisions, or driving treatments. Here, we summarize the challenges of the prehospital medical setting and review wearable sensor technology suitability for this environment, including their use with medical decision support triage or treatment guidance options. Further, we discuss recommendations for wearable healthcare device development and medical decision support technology to better support the prehospital medical setting. With further design improvement and integration with decision support tools, wearable healthcare devices have the potential to simplify and improve medical care in the challenging prehospital environment.