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3.16.04 Members of the WIISARD project, led by PI Leslie Lenert, conducted a small-scale training drill for emergency responders at the Carlsbad public safety training institute on March 3. Given an emergency scenario when the number of injured is so large that they have to be treated on site of the disaster, WIISARD seeks to be able to track patients and their conditions wirelessly through different stations: decontamination, triage, treatment, and transport to a hospital.

The goal of the drill was to test a patient monitoring system. Two components were tested: transferring data from a pulse-ox device to a pocketPC and from there to a laptop, and displaying multiple pulse-ox data on a laptop. Due to time constraints, the participants were not able to test the WAN environment (that is, sending data from the laptop to a remote server via QUALCOMM's 1xEV-DO wireless).

The participants included members of the fire, police, sheriff, SWAT, and forestry departments; emergency medical technicians; members of the HAZMAT team; and academics from Calit², the UCSD Medical Center, and San Diego State University.

This event was held to plan for a full-scale drill on May 12.

Accompanying photos show various devices used in radioactivity detection and decontamination, and the WIISARD team testing wireless pulse-oximeter devices with first responders.