Equivital remote physiological welfare monitoring system

Origins
Hidalgo, a Cambridge based product design company, formed in 1997, has developed Equivital in co-operation with the United States Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine. Hidalgo specializes in medical device design and radio communications, and has customers and suppliers in Europe, the US and the Far East. The emphasis is on designing products for medium and high volume production runs.

Equivital^TM - Emergency !

Fire Service - Paramedics/Ambulance Services - Police - Coastal/Mountain Rescue

Fire Service

Fire personnel would apply the Equivital device en route to the incident scene. As in the military use the device would send short data bursts with the wearer's status information back to a monitoring point. This may be a local on-scene system that is managing the operation, a remote command and control centre, or both. Equivital can communicate data over a number of public safety communications networks that support data transfer, including the European radio standard TETRA.

Paramedics/Ambulance Services

Whilst it is unlikely that paramedics would need to wear the Equivital device in normal day to day duties, certain situations may require this type of protection, particularly in ad hoc field treatment zones, treating a patient in a situation where the paramedics are at risk, and when wearing additional protective equipment (CBRN) which increases the level of physiological stress on the user.

Police

The police would wear the Equivital device when they are at risk either from their location or other humans.

Examples of this may be a terrorist incident, assistance with a CBRN incident or where firearms are involved. In each case the monitoring console would be mounted in a police vehicle or the mobile incident control centre.

Should a policeman be working alone, then Equivital provides a means of monitoring the policeman's welfare, with the police command centre initiating the emergency response if one is required.

Coastal/Mountain Rescue

Before departure, rescue workers would put on a belt-based Equivital, which would monitor their welfare. Partial disclosure data and alarms would be passed back to a control centre based on land or at the mountain rescue centre.