For the initial study, Stair hopes that 10 ER patients will agree to wear a SMART system for about an hour each during peak traffic periods at the Brigham's emergency room, especially if they have chest pains or shortness of breath. "Who knows, we might find [the patients] are not as stable as we thought," Stair says. He hopes to eventually gather a database on how patients flow through the ER and into the hospital, discover bottlenecks, and ultimately improve the operations of the Brigham hospital's emergency room.

The researchers have gotten a $3 million grant from the National Library of Medicine to develop emergency-response technology. And they hope that a system like SMART might eventually be manufactured commercially.

But there are still plenty of bugs to work out, they say. For one thing, battery life needs to be longer, points out Robert Greenes, director of the Decisions Systems Group at the Brigham, who's also on the SMART team. The current system leaves its electricity-hogging Wi-Fi transmitter on all the time. And for real-world use, Greenes says, the wires to the heart and oxygen sensors need to be replaced by wireless Bluetooth connections. "I want to move to another plateau and have a robust trial," he says.

Home page image courtesy of Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston. Caption: Thomas O. Stair, M.D., research director, Brigham and Women's Hospital Emergency Department and associate professor, Harvard Medical School, holding some of the SMART equipment.