14.1 Introduction

From ancient time, being medical services is the most important thing. Medical services are always the most demanding service all over the world. There are several types of equipment for health services. Among this equipment, ambulance is one of the most important medical service. Ambulance is used to transport patients. The word ambulance comes from the Latin word “ambulare”. The meaning of this word is move out or to walk. In ancient times, carts were used as an ambulance to transfer patients. There are different types of ambulances according to their function like emergency ambulance which one is the mostly used most common type ambulance, patient transport ambulance that is generally used to transport patient from hospitals or nursing homes, ambulance bus that is a bus-type ambulance mainly used to transport more than one number of patients, charity ambulance that is a special type of ambulance arranged from any charity home for children or adults to take them on a trip from hospitals, and bariatric ambulance that is used to transport extremely fat people with proper equipment to maintain these patients and so on. Now, the design of an ambulance is mostly based on vans or pick-up-trucks and sometimes also based on motorcycles, aircrafts, cars, boats, buses, etc. Ambulance can be needed at any time anywhere. Mainly ambulance is used to transport patients in emergency cases. Patients who are in critical condition like stroke, heart attack, pregnancy, or any type of accident are mostly needed ambulance. Critical condition can come in any moment any time so ambulance is anytime anywhere the most needed and most unavoidable medical service. As ambulance is used in critical or emergency medical condition, so it contains light with flash and sirens to warn other vehicles in the road that there is an emergency condition so that the other vehicles can leave the path for the ambulance so that the ambulance can take the patient to hospital or nursing home without creating any late or any loss of patients’ life. Sometimes, ambulance means a moving hospital because it serves the first treatment to the patient so the patients’ condition can become stable for a short time before reaching hospital or nursing home. Inner place of an ambulance mainly has a place for a or more than one patient and some other places for some medical service provider like nurse who can give prior medical service to the patient in emergency or critical condition. Ambulance also provides several emergency medical services like first aid and oxygen cylinder facility to provide the patient stability in his or her critical condition. Beside this necessary medical equipment, ambulances also arrange some special equipment like two-way radio, mobile data terminal, tail lift, trauma lighting, CCTV, and data recorders. In any type of critical or emergency, medical condition ambulance is the first preference for transport of the patient to the hospital or nursing home as well as for the first emergency medical services. So, for this reason, sometimes, hospitals or nursing homes cannot provide ambulances for the patients in time, and this condition, some clubs or NGOs provide emergency ambulance services to the patients. Ambulance sometimes is also used for returning a patient from hospital or nursing home to home. But sometime, getting ambulance at time becomes so much tough like in the midnight if there is any emergency condition for patient, it sometimes difficult to get ambulance or if ambulance is got it cannot reach at time. So, it becomes so hard time of patient and his or her family to transfer patient to hospital or nursing home. So, in this flourishing era of technology where everything like daily necessities, grocery, clothes, and food, whatever we want is at the doorstep why medical services will be at backsteps. When peoples’ every demand is fulfilled with one click on a mobile application, then also the most essential, i.e., medical service especially ambulance service, should be also be available through mobile application. Also, nowadays, IoT is the most popular technology to be applied for any technology-based smart device. Now, the question will grow everyone’s mind is what is IoT and why it is so popular in the world of technology. IoT is the short form of Internet of Things (IoT) that means where we apply the idea of internet or something that is related to Internet. The IoT defines that how the “things” that are implanted with software, other technologies, and sensors are connected with other devices and exchange with other devices over the internet. Due to the interface of real-time investigation, various technologies and fixed systematical things have evolved in large numbers. To enable the traditional fields of machine learning and automation (including building and house automation), wireless sensor networks, control systems, and others contribution are included. In the shopper market, technology of IoT is mostly matches with the products containing the concept of the “smart home”, that includes devices and appliances (like lighting fixtures, home security systems, thermostats and cameras, and other home appliances) that support more than one common ecosystem, and these devices are controlled by ecosystem, such as smartphones and smart speakers. In healthcare also, IoT technology is used. But there is also some danger in using the technology of IoT, especially in the fields of privacy and security. First IoT concept that is the network of smart devices was discovered in 1982 with a Coca-Cola vending machine with very first internet appliance. The application area of IoT can be differentiated mostly in four kinds like consumer, commercial or organizational, industrial, and infrastructure spaces. Most of the IoT applications are in consumer field like connected vehicles, home automation, wearable technology, connected health, and appliances with remote monitoring capabilities. In organizational applications, IoT is applied in medical and healthcare, transportation, and building and home automation. In industrial fields, IoT applications are in manufacturing, agriculture, and maritime. In infrastructure areas, it is in metropolitan scale deployments, energy managements, environmental monitoring, and living lab. Also, it is also applied in military fields and product digitization. So, we tried to develop a mobile application for fast ambulance service using IoT. This is an organizational application of IoT. Here in healthcare and medical fields, IoT is applied. Through this application, patients’ family can get ambulance any time in there near about locality very soon and very easily. It will be a 24-hour service app where ambulance service will be active for any time. In this app, patient will be provided all types of facilities and there will be several options to be chosen like if patient needed oxygen facility or not, nurse facility or not, or if that will be a pregnancy case then some other special services will be provided. Beside ambulance facility, through this app, anyone can get facility of first aid, can get information about nearby pharmacy, hospitals, and blood banks, and also can get information about home health care, health insurance, etc. In this app, patients’ family has to provide the current location of the patient and then by giving the nearby hospital name and also have to give the time that when the ambulance will be arriving and there will also be a drop down for special services like AC, oxygen, and nurse. Patient’s family member can also contact with the ambulance driver or can see where the ambulance’s location is. Also, in any emergency case there will be an emergency button or also there will be a transport and shifting button for any special type of transporting arrangements. So, in this way, all types of advantages will be provided through this app so that any patient’s will not be fallen at danger. Our motto is to save each and everyone’s life and fulfill all types of medical needs.

14.2 Literature Review

B. Janani Saradha et al. proposed a system of cloud networking which connect both ambulance and traffic controlling unit. RFID technology is used to achieve intelligent traffic signal control. The idea is to detect the ambulance near the signal, the ambulance is tracked by RFID reader which is attached with RFID tag and the data is send to the cloud. After sending the data through mobile app, the user receives the acknowledgment, then system changes to green signal automatically in the path of ambulance. This way, it provides undisturbed services to emergency vehicle [1].

Jay Lohokare et al. proposed an exclusive idea of handling live location of the emergency services. Using these locations, people who need emergency services can connect easily to the official centers. The main contribution of this paper is to provide a solution for the entire city where huge number of users will be using this system. For this application, the mandatory need according to the author is of Internet and GPS (Global Positioning System). This device can enable such a smart phone through which exact location can be sent to the server. This paper gives will help to handle huge number of users [2].

Omkar Udawant et al. proposed a smart ambulance system. The basic idea of this paper is to check that whether the range of the ambulance is within 100 m, then the color changes to green signal for some time. They use cloud and GPRS technology for tracking. Ambulance contains sensors like heart rate sensor, blood pressure, ECG to send data to hospital’s database at the mean time. According to patient’s condition, the treatment will be done by the hospital authorities. So, it saves time as well as patient’s condition [3].

Homan Samani et al. have proposed an AED (Automated External Defibrillator) which is an ambulance robot termed as Ambubot. This Ambubot arrives and checks the pulse rate of the person who had a sudden cardiac attack and if it notices that the pulse rate is less, it suddenly gives permission to press a button which provides a shock to the cardiac captured person. So, the pulse rate improves and the person should be free from risk [4].

Arif Shalik has proposed GPS sensor which send data to the cloud, and from there, an alarm message will be received by whoever is brought into that vehicle. The flag will show the situation’s condition and helps to locate the GPS area. The ambulance will use the GPS tracking system to get the location as fast as possible [5].

Venkatesh H et al. have proposed a system which makes use of embedded technology for Intelligent Traffic Control. In this system, the main aim is to control the traffic signal board to green whenever the ambulance is stuck in traffic and making the opposite traffic signal board to red signal. Using GPS and cloud, a request is send to traffic signal point to the user connecting to the cloud server by GSM technology. This proposed system does not have any other alternative method in case of technology failure such as embedded technology is mostly hardware based and failure in hardware would outcome into complete system failure. Secondly, the use of GSM technology is uncertain as network failure in GSM would mean that the request is not send to the traffic signal board on time and in such cases the proposed system will be of no use. Also, it does not specify the emergency and non-emergency situations [6].

Prashant Jadhav et al. have proposed work in makes use of Image Processing Technique. Over here, at first a film of lane is captured by a web camera which is placed in traffic lane that captures images of roads wherein we want to control the traffic. In order to have information about the traffic density these images are processed efficiently using the MATLAB software and then the controller sends the command to the traffic signal board to show particular time on the signal to manage traffic [7].

An advance warning system for ambulance passes for Indian scenarios was developed by Madhav Mishra et al. This research is basically based on the concept of IoT, along with other technologies. The architecture which is frequently used is server and client architecture. This is an android application using a client [8].

Buchenscheit, Andreas et al. have implemented an emergency vehicle warning system based on VANET. The system alerts the emergency vehicle that uses inter-vehicle communication and also surrounds roadside infrastructure like traffic lights. Through this system, other vehicles can be warned of an arriving emergency vehicle and also can receive detailed route information [9].

The Arduino-based RFID system that is used to change the traffic signal upon arrival at a traffic light junction was proposed by B. Janani Sharadha et al. The concept of this system is if an ambulance or any emergency vehicle stops at the signal, the installed RFID will control that emergency vehicle. The acknowledgement for the user through the mobile app where the particular signal is made Green for a particular duration and when ambulance passes by, it again gets back to its original sequence of signaling. If this system becomes automated, then it can fully track the route of the ambulance and can control the traffic signaling as per the ambulance route. Through this system the signaling process can be controlled and fully save the time for emergency services [10].

Toru Kobayashi et al. proposed a system of an IoT for ambulance to put a special application installed in a smartphone on a dashboard. The cloud side application also tried to control the position information of the ambulance distribution in consideration for the situation of other vehicles and the privacy of ambulance users. Functional effectiveness of this system was inspected by the proof experiment in the public road [11].

Mohamed N. Ashmawy et al. proposed the main target of the platform is to increase the likelihood of the patient’s survival by having the ambulance arriving to the hospital as soon as possible while allowing the responsible doctor to monitor the patient’s biomedical data. Hence, the doctor can provide the paramedics riding with the patient with helpful instructions or prepare the needed medical services to be received by the patient upon arrival. Furthermore, the platform applies machine learning techniques on the collected data to help the doctor identify possible medical threats. We adopt a layered approach in the design of the system. A prototype of the integrated system is implemented, and its performance is evaluated [12].

Puneet Kumar Aggarwal et al. proposed an autonomic computing allude as a self-managing feature that is autonomic nervous system, which manages the body. A system is autonomic if it can monitor changes by itself, analyze, plan actions according to it, and execute them automatically in order to become a reliable system. The present work focuses on a real-life case study of traffic light management system and plays an important role in our daily lives. In most places, “especially in developing countries”, the traffic light system is time bounded, which sometimes does not allow an ambulance carrying a patient to pass through traffic light: red light. Hence, there should be a smart traffic light signal system which can overcome with such problems, allow the ambulance to pass through traffic signal whether it is red or green. This can be done using a wireless sensor network and voice recognition technology [13].

Tammishetty, Sneha et al. have proposed this method that allows the emergency vehicles like ambulances to get traffic signals controlled by the traffic area at the time of arrival so that the traffic can be regulated. This system is made of GSM, Arduino, and Android mobile system. In emergency cases, the user has to control the traffic signal by android app by travelling to ambulances [14].

The idea of traffic issues and providing the exact position of the train by using GPS was proposed by G. Hemanth Kumar et al. Through SMS, the communication will be made between train and the passenger. The second objective of this project is that it will provide an automatic spike control at a level crossing in place of the gates operated by the gatekeeper. It consists of two things. Firstly, it reduces time for which the gate is being kept closed. Secondly, for reduction of the traffic at the crossing, it also provides emergency path for ambulances [15].

14.3 Design of Smart Ambulance Booking System Through App

Nowadays, an ambulance has many facilities to comfort the patient but it is observed that ambulance online booking system is not yet launched. So, an effort has been taken to make easier service for the patient to book an ambulance in emergency purposes. Using mobile app, we are making an app for online booking system for ambulance. At first, the user has to register with their mobile number from where they have to put the pickup location and the exact destination of the patient. Now, while booking the ambulance enter card details for payment purpose and when the ambulance is booked, the nearby driver checks the list of nearby patients and confirm the booking. After that, the driver tracks the location through Google map and picks up patients from the given location and dropped (Figure 14.1). Then, the payment process will be confirmed and the driver will receive the payment.

• Locate nearest ambulance.
• Get the assurance of your booking.
• Get ready for the ambulance to pick you up.
• Get the exact arrival time for ambulance.
• Choose your payment process carefully.
• Convenient to use ambulance booking app and find the nearby location of the ambulance for emergency booking.

14.4 Smart Ambulance Booking

Medical emergencies can happen anytime anywhere. Helping a patient in the transport system is a great work and should be handled under professional guidance. During emergency, the last thing you wish for is delay. This app will provide you with ambulance providers who are always on go with their vehicles. Our advanced algorithmic logic helps you to get the driver with the ambulance that matches your requirements in the shortest possible time. The idea of the introduction of an online ambulance service is to handle the critical situation in a far better and structured manner and assures the patients that the chances of life and death situations can be reduced the maximum. Just like you book cabs over a few taps on your smartphone, similarly, you can book an ambulance now in the same way.

14.4.2 Sign Up

Through this page, one can easily signup to this app by putting their basic details (e.g., name, email address, and choosing their password to access the service). For the instant and secure process, user can also sign up using their social media account (e.g., Email id, Google pulse, and Facebook). By clicking on the Sign-Up button, the user will be redirect to the next page (Figure 14.3).

14.4.4 Ambulance Section

This is the main and vital part of the app where a user can book the ambulance by providing some basic details (e.g., pickup location, drop location, and time when the ambulance is required, if any special services are needed like Oxygen, Nurse, ICCU, AC they can choose). After filling-up all the required information the user can press the “Find Ambulance” button to redirect the next page where user can find the nearby ambulance (Figure 14.5).

14.4.5 Ambulance Selection Page

Here, user can get their nearby ambulance services from where user can select any option as per their choice to successfully book the ambulance (Figure 14.6).

14.5 Result and Discussion

• One-Touch Emergency Booking: Easily book emergency ambulance with a press of a button.
• Estimated Time to Arrival: Contact the ambulance driver via phone call to know his location.
• Easy to Use: Convenient to use and find an ambulance nearby your location for elective or emergency booking.
• Freedom of Choice: You can get to choose a free or paid ambulance available near you.
• Direct On-Call Communication: Engage effortlessly with ambulance drivers over the phone.
• Book Ambulance for Others: Be a good human being and help the patient who need emergency medical treatment (Figure 14.8).

14.6 Conclusion

The most important thing to remember is that ambulance is little different from cab booking. When you will book an ambulance, if you are booking it for emergency purpose, the app will immediately give the present location of the nearby ambulances so that you can get the ambulance as fast as possible.

The driver will immediately contact you to find out the nature of the emergency and know your exact location before the ambulance even arrives. At the same time, nearby hospitals will be informed about the emergency and will also offer some emergency advice on the spot, so that the patient’s health do not get worse before the ambulance gets there.

That is utterly important, and the problems where were centralized in the existing systems became apparent to us first-hand in present scenario. A big cricket match was going on in the weekend held by a company, and a critical accident on the ground takes place to a player breaking his leg badly, with the bone coming out badly.

At that time, everyone was in a dilemma—whether you should move the victim to keep him still, how to call an ambulance, and what to do after the ambulance came. When an ambulance was finally tracked down, it was a very incomprehensible situation in getting it to reach the actual location.

We should have a prior knowledge of what kind of emergency the patient is having and complete few formalities before booking.

In the hospitals, having their own ambulances, the ambulances are provided by the government for emergency services. As the demand keeps on increasing, it became a big challenge. Now, the faster you respond, the faster is the chances of recovery.

14.7 Future Scope

Our existing model can efficiently arrange for an ambulance according to the demand of the situation. But in future, it can be extended to book all the High Priority Vehicle Booking through which the user can avail Fire Brigade service, Police service at the earliest, by just one tap and can track the HPVB (High Priority Vehicle Booking) using GPS on the device.

The mobile application can be formulated in such a way that, it could be made to monitor the vital body parameters of the patients and necessarily take due actions within the smart ambulance itself to reduce time wastage in treatment after reaching hospitals. Accordingly, all these steps if implemented successfully could bring a new shape to the existing Smart Ambulance System benefitting the entire society at large.