Automatic Clinical Procedure Detection for Emergency Services

Understanding a patient's state is critical to providing optimal care. However, information loss occurs during patient hand-offs (e.g., emergency services (EMS) transferring patient care to a receiving hospital), which hinders care quality. Augmenting the information flow from an EMS vehicle to a receiving hospital may reduce information loss and improve patient outcomes. Such augmentation requires a noninvasive system that can automatically recognize clinical procedures being performed and send near real-time information to a receiving hospital. An automatic clinical procedure detection system that uses wearable sensors, video, and machine-learning to recognize clinical procedures within a controlled environment is presented. The system demonstrated how contextual information and a majority vote method can substantially improve procedure recognition accuracy. Future work concerning computer vision techniques and deep learning are discussed.