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In the aftermath of a disaster, it is usually difficult to communicate and coordinate the activities of the various emergency incident responders responsible for triage at multiple disaster incident scenes. Incident scenes are often spread out across a large geo-physical area, and emergency response usually occurs with limited manpower. Thus, the challenge is to have rapid setup of a disaster incident command system (ICS) and integration of disaster wide real-time location and status information across the various staff, patients and incidents to provide a cohesive picture across the disaster incident scenes.
In this paper, we address these concerns through a novel design of a cloud based distributed geo-location service for a next-generation ICS. We describe software services that integrate wireless mesh elements, geo-location, messaging, incident and responder information management and video streaming services. The aim of these services design is to deploy them in austere physical environments, where existing communication channels may be unavailable due to disaster impact. Our design fits within a hierarchical cloud-fog platform with a suite of visual and geolocation applications that provides a centralized view of the various incidents in a disaster scenario. The platform supports the ability to integrate variants of user interface dashboards and IoT devices (e.g., heads-up displays for real-time two-way communication, virtual beacons to collect contextual geolocation information), as well as response protocols to guide an emergency responder’s actions by providing a context related checklist to ensure the right procedures were followed. The contextual information includes the present and previous locations of patients and staff, a video stream of a staff member’s camera, the location and details of the various incidents across the disaster scene, and the statuses of the patients. Thus, the platform has the potential to improve situational awareness to prioritize triage resources, reduce the frequency of human error in incident response, leverage manpower effectively at incident sites, and improve overall triage accuracy. We conclude the paper with a demonstration of our implementation that simulates a real-time dynamic map marker functionality during management of several incidents and provides benefits for: (a) medical triage, and (b) protest crowd incident management.
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