Location and Situation-Awareness for Disaster Medicine

Abstract

Situation awareness is the basis of ubiquitous society. We try to sense or capture physical phenomena such as change of temperature and rain, or try to recognize and analyze the forms, locations and behavior of the real world’s objects (such as vehicles and pedestrians) and landscape. We have learned that such situation awareness is also very significant for rescue operations in cases when many people are injured suddenly by a large accident or a disaster in small and condensed regions. For example, in Japan, we experienced a very tragic train accident in 2005 in which over 100 people died and about 460 people were injured. It has been reported that rescue teams need to recognize the positions and condition of patients for efficient rescue operations in such a situation. Accordingly, we have designed and developed an electronic triage system, which continuously senses the vital signs of the patients and estimates their locations by IEEE802.15.4-based wireless sensor networks (Fig. 1). We have lead this national project, involving five organizations with several medical doctors and professors in an emergency care department [1]. These doctors say that fast recognition of obstacles such as buildings in the region will be very helpful for rescue operations and treatment actions. It is desirable to generate a local map of the site, which tells us building and street structure information in a city section, the presence of warehouses in a factory, or complicatedly connected small buildings on a university campus. However, such a local and thus detailed map cannot often be obtained from a public map, especially if the region is private property, and even pathways (or streets) may be changed after a disaster. Using digital images of the landscape or range information from radar sensors is a possibility to build a map, but dedicated effort (i.e., taking pictures or measuring ranges at specific points toward specific directions) to obtain such information is required. This encumbers efficient rescue operations since doctors and rescue teams always need manpower for treatment actions. Thus automated acquisition of a local map without dedicated hardware is mandatory in such emergency situation. We introduce our local map estimation technology for the recognition of an accident site in an emergency situation [2]. We assume that each member in the rescue teams, called a mobile node, is equipped with a GPS receiver and a mid-range communication device such as IEEE802.11 or IEEE802.15.4 that can directly communicate with others several tens of meters away. Since such equipment is very general, the Fig. 1. Electronic Triage Tag