Emergency Vehicle Gadget Overload Will Kill/Save Us All

Cops get laptops , ambu - gig drivers got cellphones , and now reckon , they ’re all running us over and making us dead . This is a concern correct now!So should you be outraged and/or frightened ? believably not .

The NYT ’s top technical school story today is about the precipitate increase in gadgetry in emergency vehicles , from navigation system and laptops to plain old mobile phone , which first responders , like everyone else in the world , tend to get distracted by . The anecdotes , as you’re able to imagine , are wicked :

In April 2008 , an emergency medical technician in West Nyack , N.Y. , count at his GPS screenland , swerved and come to a parked flatbed truck . The crash sheared off the side of the ambulance and leave his spouse , who was in the passenger seat , paralytic .

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But here ’s the issue : the NYT give very early on that “ data does not exist ” to keep going or rebut any kind of dissertation about whether or not gadgets have made exigency personnel , and by extension us , more or less safe .

And even if there was data — say , that gadgetry have a 2 % growth crashes for pinch personnel department — we’d be roped into making an impossible deliberation : Is this 2 % addition , and touch uptick in injuries and death , worth the injury and deaths extenuate by dissipated ambulance drivers are able to voyage now , thanks to their Garmins ? Both are hard to quantify on their own , and together , they ’d make for a hazy equality .

For every narrative of an ambulance driver function over an sometime lady because he was distracted by a screensaver , there ’s a story of an old lady who died because an ambulance machine driver had to have his partner confer with a single-valued function rather of a GPS unit , and in the end , they ’re all anecdote .

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