IT-Supported Management of Mass Casualty Incidents: The e-Triage Project

Voice, analogue mobile radio, and paper have been successfully used for decades for coordination of emergencies and disasters, but although being simple and robust this approach cannot keep pace with today’s requirements any more. Emerging and established digital communication standards open the door to new applications and services, but the expected benefit needs to be carefully evaluated against robustness, interoperability, and user-friendliness. This paper describes a framework for IT-supported management of mass casualty incidents, which is currently under implementation and study. The four pillars of the concept are handheld devices for use both in daily rescue operations and in disasters, autonomous satellite-based communication infrastructure, a distributed database concept for maximal availability, and psychological acceptance research

Internet of Things-aided Smart Grid: Technologies, Architectures, Applications, Prototypes, and Future Research Directions

Traditional power grids are being transformed into Smart Grids (SGs) to address the issues in existing power system due to uni-directional information flow, energy wastage, growing energy demand, reliability and security. SGs offer bi-directional energy flow between service providers and consumers, involving power generation, transmission, distribution and utilization systems. SGs employ various devices for the monitoring, analysis and control of the grid, deployed at power plants, distribution centers and in consumers' premises in a very large number. Hence, an SG requires connectivity, automation and the tracking of such devices. This is achieved with the help of Internet of Things (IoT). IoT helps SG systems to support various network functions throughout the generation, transmission, distribution and consumption of energy by incorporating IoT devices (such as sensors, actuators and smart meters), as well as by providing the connectivity, automation and tracking for such devices. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey on IoT-aided SG systems, which includes the existing architectures, applications and prototypes of IoT-aided SG systems. This survey also highlights the open issues, challenges and future research directions for IoT-aided SG systems

Providing First Responders with Real-Time Status of Cellular Networks During a Disaster

Existing systems for reporting cellular outages do not provide adequate geographical granularity and do not provide a real-time view of the state of the communication network. This work presents a system for real-time measurement of both coverage and quality of service via crowdsourced measurements from consumer and first responder phones. Baseline coverage and quality of service data is collected prior to a major disaster. During a major disaster, real-time data is compared to baseline to identify areas of congestion or outages. Such information can be used by incident commanders to more effectively deploy resources during major disasters. Furthermore, such system state information can be used to support automatic deployment of temporary cellular network base stations, such as on drones

A Wearable Platform for Patient Monitoring during Mass Casualty Incidents

Based on physiological data, intelligent algorithms can assist with the classification and recognition of the most severely impaired victims. This dissertation presents a new sensorbased triage platform with the main proposal to join different sensor and communications technologies into a portable device. This new device must be able to assist the rescue units along with the tactical planning of the operation. This dissertation discusses the implementation and the evaluation of the platform

A Wearable Platform for Patient Monitoring during Mass Casualty Incidents

Based on physiological data, intelligent algorithms can assist with the classification and recognition of the most severely impaired victims. This book presents a new sensorbased triage platform with the main proposal to join different sensor and communications technologies into a portable device. This new device must be able to assist the rescue units along with the tactical planning of the operation. This work discusses the implementation and the evaluation of the platform

Development of an open-source mobile application for emergency data collection

This Master degree project identified disasters and emergencies as a global humanitarian and technological challenge. Emergency management organizations' need for access to accurate and up-to-date information about the emergency situation, to help respond to, recover from and mitigate the effects of disasters and emergencies, presents a challenge to the field of Geomatics. Today the use of remote sensing technologies presents an increasing number of solutions. There are types of spatial data, however, e.g. submerged, non-visual or otherwise hidden features that still require emergency field personnel and volunteers to interpret and record. By utilizing the increasing ubiquity and computational power of modern smartphones, in order to reach a large number of potential users and volunteers, a mobile application for emergency field data collection was developed. It was developed as a component of a system that, in order to be as collaborative, adaptable and accessible as possible, also to resource-poor organizations, was, with a minor exception, completely open-source licensed. Field trials were held that, due to low participation, could not conclusively evaluate the application and its general applicability to emergency field data collection. They did, however, provide an adequate proof-of-concept and showed that it was possible to apply the application and the implemented system to a specific emergency field data collection task. The system has great collaborative potential, achieved through openness, mobility, standards compliance, multi-source capability and adaptability. Its administrators are given a high degree of control that lets them adapt the system to suit the current users and situation and its flexibility make it widely applicable, not only for emergency management. From literature, the field trials and the experience gained while developing and using the application, some ideas for improving the application and the system were discussed and some future research topics were suggested.Under och efter katastrofer och nödsituationer samlas många olika organisationer för att hjälpa de drabbade. Det kan vara t.ex. polis, brandkår, sjukvård, eller elbolag som måste reparera ledningsnät. Vid större katastrofer kan myndigheter och internationella hjälporganisationer också behöva komma till undsättning. För att dessa organisationer ska kunna hjälpa till på ett effektivt sätt måste de ha tillgång till uppdaterad och korrekt information om krisläget. En stor del av den här informationen är kopplad till en specifik plats; den är geografisk. Idag får organisationer som jobbar med krishantering mycket av sin geografiska information från satelliter och flygbilder, men en del typer av information kan inte ses med satellit. Dessa kan vara t.ex. ledningar som ligger begravda under markytan eller mänskliga skador och behov. Därför behövs också någon form av system som personal och volontärer i fält kan använda för att rapportera till krisledningscentraler på ett effektivt sätt. Många sådana system har historiskt sett varit dyra att skaffa eftersom de krävt avancerade datorprogram och dyr teknisk utrustning till personalen i fält. Eftersom de dessutom många gånger varit svåra att använda har det varit svårt för krishanterings-organisationer att få ihop tillräckligt många personer att hjälpa till. Det här projektet syftade till att utveckla en mobil-app, d.v.s. ett program till moderna mobiltelefoner (s.k. smartphones). Målet med appen var att alla som äger en smartphone av rätt typ skulle kunna bidra till att samla viktig geografisk information till krisledningscentralen. Genom att låta appen vara en del av ett system som är helt gratis att använda och med öppen källkod, kan även organisationer med små resurser och lite pengar använda den. Tack vare att så många redan äger smartphones som de dessutom redan är vana vid att använda kan det bli lättare att få fler att kunna medverka. Utvecklingen av appen lyckades och hela systemet är gratis att använda och utgivet – nästan – helt med öppen källkod. Appen testades, men av för få deltagare för att kunna dra några definitiva slutsatser om systemet är lämpligt att använda för krishantering. Dock visade appen och systemet god potential under testerna och att det var möjligt att använda appen för att samla information i en katastrofsituation