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PUBLICATIONS

Requirements Analysis for Safer Ambulance Patient Compartments

Published

Author(s)

Mehdi Dadfarnia, Yung-Tsun T. Lee, Allison Barnard Feeney, Deogratias Kibira

Abstract

Providing emergency care services in the confined space of the patient compartment of a moving ambulance is a hazardous activity. A National Institute of Standards & Technology (NIST)/Department of Homeland Security (DHS) project is applying systems engineering approaches to analyze requirements and develop design guidance that will improve Emergency Medical Service (EMS) workers' safety while optimizing patient care. The analysis of an ambulance's patient compartment requires multiple disciplines such as ergonomics and crashworthiness. Systems engineering tools provide a platform to perform the analysis by bridging these disciplines and bringing information sources together. In the first phase of this project we compiled a number of requirements from the results of literature reviews, a nationwide web survey, workshops and focus group meetings. The next phase entails our process for reconciling potentially conflicting requirements from use case scenarios and then determining which constraints and metrics to be used for trade-off analysis and optimization in a human simulation modelling tool. The results of this analysis are being used to develop ambulance patient compartment design recommendations that will be provided as inputs to current and emerging ambulance design standards.
Proceedings Title
2013 Conference on Systems Engineering Research
Conference Dates
March 19-22, 2013
Conference Location
Atlanta, GA
Pub Type
Conferences

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Keywords

Ambulance patient compartment, use cases, requirements analysis, systems engineering
Manufacturing systems design and analysis, First responder preparedness and Disaster and failure studies

Citation

Dadfarnia, M. , Lee, Y. , Barnard, A. and Kibira, D. (2013), Requirements Analysis for Safer Ambulance Patient Compartments, 2013 Conference on Systems Engineering Research, Atlanta, GA, [online], https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=912743 (Accessed November 21, 2024)

Issues

If you have any questions about this publication or are having problems accessing it, please contact reflib@nist.gov.

Created March 22, 2013, Updated February 19, 2017