AmbER

Life saving solution to deliver time-critical patients to hospitals through Ambulance.

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Inspiration

To this day, there remains no constructive, operative, and practical method that efficiently helps in emergencies to deliver time-critical patients to hospitals.

The access to ambulances and the reaching of ambulances on the location of patients have been time-consuming. Not only that but, also the process to register an ambulance can take approximately 10 to 20 minutes for a person. This happens because the user has to explain the route to the ambulance driver, providing details to the ambulance call center. These formalities take a lot of time, which can be fatal for critical patients reaching the hospital on time.

What it does

Amber (Ambulance to ER ) acting exactly as its name suggests when it comes to registering an ambulance and making contact easier between ambulance service and the user. Where the whole process is automated, you don't have to worry about any external equipment as it is just available on your mobile phones. All you have to do is a message on WhatsApp, select your desired language, provide the address using pin location and hospital name you need to go, and provide other necessary information for ambulance service and you won't feel troubled about getting an ambulance to your doorstep. From there The ambulance captains have access to the AmbER app through which they will reach you through the most optimal route, but also will help them in utilizing the best route from the pickup to the hospital making sure that critical emergencies can be catered in the most optimized time. It is time-efficient, easy, and reliable.

Innovation/Competitive Edge

Currently, no such automated system exists which provides similar services. Also, the integration of WhatsApp and google maps with the ambulance captain app in flutter can allow ambulances to reach users in the least amount of time and also be aware of any extra conditions that may be needed for Pre-hospital care. Also after reaching the pickup point the ambulance captain can have access to multiple routes to reach the hospital using our app which is integrated with Google Maps allowing them to be alert about open/closed roads, and roads with high traffic.

Estimating The Impact

In Pakistan, the ambulance service systems are quite unreliable. The number of hospitals in Pakistan is limited. Also, the process of calling an ambulance and registering and contacting the ambulance driver to help him to reach the location takes up a considerable amount of time. Using our solution we tend to reduce that time as much as possible and provide the ambulance captain's as much knowledge and information before reaching the pickup point to assist the user in this emergency and help in saving a person's life.

What's next for AmbER

  • Scale the app for other emergency situations like fire, the need for first aid, etc.
  • App integration with the other apps that are most commonly used, and to make it more accessible for less privileged populations, AmbER needs to be integrated with SMS service using Twilio and allowing them access to this amazing service helping people save lives.
  • It's not hard to find news or reports of ambulances complaining about people misusing their services. This can be spam, prank calls, or just overall behavior that wastes resources on all fronts. Blacklisting is something to consider for AmbER, but not yet been implemented into the service as of right now.

What Did we use?

The hackathon prototype is split into two interfaces,

  1. One for the user. This can be the patient themselves, or someone on behalf of the patient (caretaker),
  2. This is based on WhatsApp, and uses Twilio as a service for intercommunication
  3. It has textual instructions, as well as an audio clip for English / Urdu routes and an image on how to share your image via a pin
  4. One for the AmbER driver. A kind of Uber that helps drivers find the most optimal route for the patient and the hospital they wish to visit
  5. This is based on Flutter and offers a Uber-like experience for quick navigation
  6. To test out the demo, you can download the APK file here!
  7. To login into the application, please use these credentials, Email: Spam11196@gmail.com, Password: shahmeer
  8. Both applications will communicate with each other to update the driver and user on the information they need. For example, AmbER on WhatsApp hands out a form to the caretaker/patient to fill out the information that would be needed by the hospital and the driver, and this gets forwarded to both. The user has the option to get updates of the driver by getting the driver's phone number.

image for whatsapp + twilio

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