CognitiveEMS

Abstract

This paper presents our preliminary results on development of a Cognitive assistant system for Emergency Medical Services (CognitiveEMS) that aims to improve situational awareness and safety of first responders. CognitiveEMS integrates a suite of smart wearable sensors, devices, and analytics for real-time collection and analysis of in-situ data from incident scene and delivering dynamic data-driven insights to responders on the most effective response actions to take. We present the overall architecture of CognitiveEMS pipeline for processing information collected from the responder, which includes stages for converting speech to text, extracting medical and EMS protocol specific concepts, and modeling and execution of an EMS protocol. The performance of the pipeline is evaluated in both noise-free and noisy incident environments. The experiments are conducted using two types of publicly-available real EMS data: short radio calls and post-incident patient care reports. Three different noise profiles are considered for simulating the noisy environments: cafeteria, people talking, and emergency sirens. Noise was artificially added at 3 intensity levels of low, medium, and high to pre-recorded audio data. The results show that the i) state-of-the-art speech recognition tools such as Google Speech API are quite robust to low and medium noise intensities; ii) in the presence of high noise levels, the overall recall rate in medical concept annotation is reduced; and iii) the effect of noise often propagates to the final decision making stage and results in generating misleading feedback to responders.