How Mobile Devices are Transforming Disaster Relief and Public Safety

With its growing usage, mobile technology is greatly improving disaster relief and public safety efforts. Countries around the world face threats from natural disasters, climate change, civil unrest, terrorist attacks, and criminal activities, among others. Mobile devices, tablets, and smart phones enable emergency providers and the general public to manage these challenges and mitigate public safety concerns.In this paper, part of the Brookings Mobile Economy Project, we focus on how mobile technology provides an early warning system, aids in emergency coordination, and improves public communications. In particular, we review how mobile devices assist with public safety, disaster planning, and crisis response. We explain how these devices are instrumental in the design and functioning of integrated, multi-layered communications networks. We demonstrate how they have helped save lives and ameliorate human suffering throughout the world

A Lightweight and Flexible Mobile Agent Platform Tailored to Management Applications

Mobile Agents (MAs) represent a distributed computing technology that promises to address the scalability problems of centralized network management. A critical issue that will affect the wider adoption of MA paradigm in management applications is the development of MA Platforms (MAPs) expressly oriented to distributed management. However, most of available platforms impose considerable burden on network and system resources and also lack of essential functionality. In this paper, we discuss the design considerations and implementation details of a complete MAP research prototype that sufficiently addresses all the aforementioned issues. Our MAP has been implemented in Java and tailored for network and systems management applications.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures; Proceedings of the 2006 Conference on Mobile Computing and Wireless Communications (MCWC'2006

A case study of MMO2's Madic: A framework for creating mobile internet systems

Mobile Internet applications on ubiquitous mobile networks allows real-time, anywhere, anytime connectivity to services. Due to its scalability and potential cost savings, mobile communication is being increasingly applied in the business and consumer communities to create innovative data and voice application, which run over the Internet infrastructure. This paper reports on a case study at an organisation that created an innovative approach to developing mobile applications developed by third party independent developers. A conceptual wireless reference model is presented that was used to define the various system components required to create effective mobile applications

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