As ambulances and fire trucks become increasingly difficult to reach emergency sites in the United States due to false reports and traffic jams, stressed municipalities have found that they can avoid congestion with technology that relies on analyzing traffic patterns and classifying emergency situations.
American cities have become a testing ground for startups to improve response times to emergency calls, and they also promise to save money at the same time, according to Bloomberg.
Research group C2Smarter is using sensors to help fire engines get through crowded Manhattan streets faster, while Lyt is using artificial intelligence to determine when traffic lights can be changed from red to green in San Jose and Seattle. This will enable city vehicles can reach their destinations more quickly.
MD Ally has found a way to triage and redirect 911 calls in Phoenix and Fort Myers, Florida, so that hospital emergency departments are not inundated with calls for non-emergency cases, as it seeks to provide medical care to those He needs it.
Importance of Efforts
These efforts follow a general trend of AI-driven productivity gains and cost reductions for companies across the United States, but in these cases, the positive results could save lives. In New York City alone, the average emergency response time was about eight minutes, more than a minute longer than in 2013, while response times to fires also increased.
C2Smarter, a federally funded consortium of researchers from seven institutions and headed by New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering, has begun work on creating a so-called digital twin of some streets in Manhattan’s Harlem neighborhood to simulate traffic and traffic patterns to improve response time fire brigades.
“We know traffic is getting worse, it’s impacting emergency medical services and fire response times, and we’d like to better understand what causes that,” said New York City Fire Commissioner Laura Kavanaugh. “How can we make recommendations if we don’t understand the human behavior behind them? Not only “The places where traffic is getting worse, but also what affects it and what reduces its severity.”
Advanced Technologies
The technology used by C2Smarter relies on data from street sensors to analyze which roads have become more congested in recent years due to electric bicycles used for delivery, Amazon trucks, and restaurant kiosks on sidewalks. The technology can tell vehicles the best routes to take to reach the fire site.
Lead researcher Joseph Chu hopes to conduct real-time simulations, for example to test which vehicle might be in the best position to respond to an emergency. This vehicle may not be the closest to the location, depending on daily traffic fluctuations.
“We’re still in the experimental phase right now,” said Zhu, whose team is collating all the data to train the AI traffic prediction system. “We should have something more concrete” by the summer.
Founded in 2016, Lite began its business by helping city buses navigate their route more quickly, but the company’s “cross signal priority” technology can be applied to first responder vehicles as well. Tim Maynard, the company’s founder and CEO, began his career as an engineer at Toyota and later at Tesla, working on traffic simulators and smart cars. What he had in mind at the time, Maynard said, was: “If we could just take this technology to cities, we could change traffic for everyone.”
Successful Experiences
Menard created a system that links sensors that track city vehicles and software that controls traffic signals, providing him with real-time data on road conditions, which Light’s artificial intelligence in turn analyzes to adjust the timing of red and green signals and help buses reach their next stop quickly.
The system, which learns different patterns as it performs its tasks, could even be applied to municipal snow plows. San Jose began testing Lite on a limited number of bus routes in 2018, followed by Seattle, Portland, Oregon, and other cities.
The number of hours buses stopped waiting for green lights in San Jose and Portland decreased by 9,107 hours, the equivalent of 54 weeks. In addition, reducing the periods of stopping the vehicle while the engine is running also saved fuel amounting to $569,000 in these two cities alone during 2023, and reduced carbon dioxide emissions.
Over the next two years, San Jose plans to expand LITE’s use to 242 additional intersections, while the city of Toronto is now using it to improve snow plow routes. “Things are going smoothly right now,” Menard said.
Non-emergency calls
‘But traffic is not the only factor delaying the arrival of ambulances and fire engines. About half of the 240 million calls 911 receives annually are non-emergency,” said Chanel Fields, the entrepreneur who founded MD Ally and whose father volunteered as an emergency medical technician.
“911 is the first number we learn as children, and many people use it to get the care they need,” said Fields, who earned an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in 2019. “So the scope of the 911 service has expanded to include providing care to populations in all forms, “There is only one response option, which is emergency.”
Human Services
MD Ally integrates with 911 dispatch and electronic patient records systems to turn non-urgent calls into a video health consultation session. In this session, the speaker communicates with an emergency physician for up to an hour, during which he discusses medical history and medications to determine a treatment plan or the need for referral to specialist doctors.
“We answer the phone within 15 seconds and put the caller in touch with someone to talk to within 15 minutes,” Fields said. An MD Ally “care worker” then follows up with the person calling to make appointments and can even book them an Uber ride for the visit. The price of these services varies from one state to another and depends on the patient’s insurance coverage.
MD Ally currently serves more than five million people in Arizona, California and Florida, and more than a dozen communities are on the waiting list. Lee County, Florida, which includes the city of Fort Myers, receives about 350 emergency calls daily. The province had been relying on a local network of hospitals to provide telehealth services, but the service was overwhelmed by calls from people who were afraid to enter hospitals during the pandemic.
“What I like about (MD) is that they have that comprehensive system that works with any agency,” said Collin Johnson, deputy chief of Lee County Emergency Medical Services. But the human touch impressed Johnson more than the technology, such as when Fields personally delivered medication to a patient at his home and later cooperated with state officials to transport him to a facility for care. “That person was calling five to seven times a day,” Johnson said. “But we haven’t heard from him since then, and that’s where it matters.”
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