Smart patches in mass-casualty incidents

Abstract

The favourite Macedonian greeting for birthdays and new births is: “Be alive, healthy and happy”. Mass-casualty incidents severely endanger them all mainly due to the unavoidable overcrowding where treating of one patient might threaten the welfare of those who are also waiting for treatment. The prevention of such situations during emergencies and disasters is fixed by efficient emergency triage process. The triage identifies life threatening conditions and their severity and determines whether the patient needs an urgent intervention or not. Objectivity of judgment is crucial and depends primarily on the patients’ heart rate, respiratory rate, oxygen saturation, and blood pressure. Smart patches keep track of all these vital parameters. They are an affordable emerging technology remotely connected to healthcare institutions. To be massively used, their drawbacks need to be carefully identified and reduced as much as possible. The goal of our research was to detect which are the major ethical challenges of this emerging technology and to propose solutions that will avoid them. To accomplish the goal, four research questions were identified, thoroughly reviewed, and the results of the ethical analysis were highlighted for each question. They embrace privacy, security, reliability, responsibility issues and the usefulness of smart patches. Based on the review, we propose recommendations for the development of new patch-like devices that will support the efficient detection of respiratory and cardiovascular changes of triagelabelled victims, without interfering with their human rights and dignity.