Design and Evaluation of a Wearable Smart Blanket System for Monitoring Vital Signs of Patients in an Ambulance

Abstract

Objectives. Considering the advantages of the wearable systems (such as continuous monitoring, ease of installation, and significant efficiency), they can also be used to monitor patients in emergency situations and, particularly, in the ambulance. This study is aimed at specifying, modeling, and evaluating a wearable smart blanket system for monitoring vital signs in emergency circumstances. Method. At first, all the smart blanket system requirements were specified using an author-made questionnaire, and the essential requirements were specified in the software requirements specification format. Such an anticipated smart wearable blanket is then modeled by Unified Modeling Language. Finally, the most important quality attributes (i.e., the nonfunctional requirements) of the proposed wearable smart blanket system were evaluated using a descriptive-analytical study. Results. Evaluation results of the proposed system show that using the smart blanket system could not only provide the required functionalities, but also, it improved the important quality attributes such as response time and delay in sending data packets (14% improvement), accuracy, energy consumption (18% improvement), reliability and fault-tolerance, and performance (28% improvement) in contrast to the compared related work. Conclusion. Using a smart wearable blanket in an ambulance instead of such in a huge ambulance cabin would be beneficial in terms of time and space, ease of use, and maybe cost while providing the required functionalities besides having proper quality attributes.