Physical and digital design of the BlueBio biomonitoring system prototype, to be used in emergency medical response

This paper presents the physical and digital design of a wireless biomonitoring system meant to be used especially in the prehospital medical emergency response. Handling of many patients with a minimum of ressources at major incidents is an immense challenge for the emergency personnel on work at an accident site. New technology such as the BlueBio biomonitoring system, can help emergency personnel monitor the patients and support them in making priorities of treatment and transport of patients. However, if new technology is to be introduced in such a complex and stressed situation it must relate to the palpable aspects of pervasive computing. It must be able to comply with the scale of the situation and still be understandable. It must also be able to comply with change of location and of users and yet still be stable, and it must comply with the shifting requirements from the users reagarding automation and user control. Our design framework, in relation to the BlueBio monitoring system, approaches these challenges from the perspective of familiarity, medical assesement and person ID/registration of data. We present how this informs and has implications for both the pyhsical and digital design of the current prototype.