A Mobile Teletrauma System for Rural Trauma Care

This paper introduces a cost-effective, portable teletrauma system that assists the health care centers in providing pre-hospital trauma care to rural population. Simultaneous transmission of a patient´s video, medical images, and ECG signals, which is required throughout the prehospital procedure, is demonstrated over commercially available, low-bandwidth, wireless cellular data service using transmission technologies such as CDMA. Moreover, the physician can remotely control the information sent from the patient side. Such a technology will allow a trauma specialist to be virtually present at the remote location and participate in pre-hospital care, which improves the quality of trauma care and can potentially reduce mortality and morbidity.