AUBURN, Mass. - New, high-tech mannequins are giving Auburn Fire and Rescue a new way to help EMTs and firefighters prepare for emergencies in their community.
What You Need To Know
- Auburn Fire and Rescue received five new high-tech mannequins for rescue training
- The mannequins simulate breathing, a pulse, lung and heart function among other features
- EMTs practiced a rescue Wednesday in the park behind the fire station
- There are plans to practice more complex rescue scenarios in the future
Joshua Sparks, Auburn’s EMS coordinator, said there are a five mannequins in total, and underneath the Auburn Fire Department T-Shirt one of them was sporting, there’s plenty of technology that will help first responders simulate a real-life emergency.
“He does a lot of really neat stuff,” Sparks said. “Right now, you can see he’s breathing, you can feel his pulse, you can listen to his lungs, listen to his heart. If you were to do CPR on him, you could see the depth of compression and the rate of compression.”
Prior to having this technology, training relied more on classroom discussions and drawing from past experience in the field. Now, with second-by-second details on the mannequin’s vital signs available at the tips of his fingers on a tablet computer, Sparks can coach his team through a rescue operation in real time.
“Certainly over the last decade, this technology has been available in academic institutions," he said. "You see it in medical school, you see programs, different paramedic programs. But as far as departments having this amount of high-fidelity devices, I feel like we’re really lucky.”
Sparks’ team simulated a rescue Wednesday at Dr. Robert H. Goddard Park, located directly behind the Auburn Fire Department.
There are plans to introduce more challenging scenarios in the future, with firefighters and EMTs training alongside each another.
“Something like this allows us to take a donated car, which is what we’re doing in the near future, and we can place one of these or a whole family of them in a vehicle and we can perform complex EMS medical scenarios while the extraction is occurring and marry those disciplines,” Sparks said.
Sparks said the vehicle rescue scenario will likely happen sometime in August.
