Active contrl of an ambulane\ce stretcher: Simulation study

In this paper, we discuss a method for design of an ambulance stretcher which call decrease blood pressure fluctuation caused by ambulance acceleration. Recently, a lot of stretchers which can isolate the vertical vibration to reduce body resonances (4-10 Hz) have been used during ambulance transport. However, we have found that blood pressure of a patient laying in the stretcher fluctuates when the ambulance accelerates or decelerates. Since the enforced change of the blood pressure may deteriorate the patent's condition, a stretcher to cancel head-to-foot acceleration and to decrease the blood pressure variation (BPV) is expected for safe transport. We propose a method to design a stretcher which is tilted according to an adequate angle to cancel head-to-foot acceleration by gravity when the ambulance accelerates or decelerates. A control method of the stretcher is constructed by means of simulation analysis using acceleration data measured during ambulance transport. It is confirmed that the active controlled stretcher proposed has good performance for the BPV reduction.