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About the Mobidoc Project

The Mobidoc project was an R&D effort for the University of Maryland at Baltimore. Together we created a prototype that processes ambulance location data to automatically trigger hospital preparation activities. The goal of this project was to attempt to reduce the amount of time hospital staff expend tracking ambulance status and estimating ambulance (and patient) arrival times. Our role was to define the overall architecture, design the database, and create the software required for the data access, business objects and external interfaces.

The elements of this system are shown in the picture below. Ambulances report their GPS locations and other status information via a regional wireless data network to the Mobidoc server. The Mobidoc server evaluates this location information and predicts the ambulance's arrival at several key points: departure, 15 miles out, 5 miles out, and arrival at the hospital. As each key point is reached, Mobidoc replaces the predictions with actual times and alerts the hospital staff via alphanumeric pager. Mobidoc also updates ambulance status and patient status on the hospital workstations and PDAs.

The Mobidoc system was built primarily with Microsoft technologies: Windows 2000 running IIS and SQL Server, Active Server Pages with HTML, and custom business objects in Visual Basic. Additionally, we used Java-based paging functions and Palm Query Application pages for displaying ambulance status on the PDAs.