EMSAssist: An End-to-End Mobile Voice Assistant at the Edge for Emergency Medical Services

Abstract

Accurate and prompt delivery of Emergency Medical Services (EMS) is critical in emergency incidents, e.g., man-made or natural disaster areas. However, quickly selecting the correct EMS protocol(s) (which dictate the medical procedures to be administered to patients) in complex medical scenarios, remains a key, demanding task for Emergency Medical Technicians (EMT). In this paper, we present EMSAssist, the first end-to-end mobile voice assistant at the edge for EMS. EMSAssist consists of three major components that address technical challenges present in state-of-the-art solutions: 1) For the first time, EMSAssist proposes and applies a few-sample fine-tuning technique in medical speech recognition task, that achieves a faster and more accurate speech transcription on our EMS audio dataset, when compared to Google Cloud Speech-to-Text; 2) A WordPiece tokenizer helps boosting the end-to-end EMS protocol selection accuracy by retrieving useful information from incorrect transcriptions; 3) A novel data customization framework that enables our data-driven EMSMobileBERT model to become the new state-of-the-art for EMS protocol selection. Extensive end-to-end evaluation results at the edge show EMSAssist can more accurately select EMS protocols (Top-5 accuracy above 96%) for EMTs, with end-to-end latencies of around 4.2 seconds.