Mobile Triage Support System for Pediatric Emergencies

This paper describes the process and methodology of designing and developing a mobile support system to triage abdominal pain in the emergency room of a hospital. Application of rough sets theory and fuzzy measures to data collected at Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario allows us to identify the most relevant clinical symptoms and signs while evaluating an abdominal pain patient. This information was used to develop a multi-level clinical algorithm that forms the reasoning module of a triage support system. We describe a front-end system called MAT that is installed on Palm handheld and that can be used to triage a child irrespective of the available information. We present MAT’s functions allowing for the electronic data capture and wireless data transfer. Such a system’s design and implementation supports triage at a bed side and facilitates fast and reliable patients’ record transfer and storage.