Preface for a special issue on “Smart environments and collective computational intelligence for disaster management”

Abstract

Stakeholders in disaster management settings often find the effective and efficient utilisation of emerging technologies quite a challenging process but very frequently a critical computational inclusion to the intelligence required for protecting individuals, communities, their environment and critical infrastructures. The special issue is dedicated to the dissemination of original contributions that are related to the theories, practices and concepts of smart environments and emerging collective computational and collaborative technologies for the specific purpose of improving intelligence when managing natural or man-made disasters. In particular, the special issue is focused on the applicability—for the purpose of managing disasters—of technologies that can support autonomous adaptation to complex and messy situations caused from these, highly dynamic contexts. Various methods and technologies including simulations, multi-dimensional decision modeling, data mining, swarm intelligence, smart spaces and sensors, contextaware, situated and pervasive computing, geographical information systems, ad-hoc mobile networks, wireless communications, grid and cloud computing, social networks and crowd sourcing are a smart technology means to enable a more informed decision making to mitigate and prepare for, respond to and recover from growing occurrences of disasters. This special issue comprises six articles, which have been selected after a careful review process. Specifically, this is a collection of extended versions of papers presented either at the Smart Environments for Disaster Management (SEDM-2011) workshop which run in conjunction with the 6th 3PGCIC-2011, held on October 26–28, 2011 in Barcelona, Spain or at the Computational Intelligence for Disaster Management (CIDM-2011) workshop which run in conjunction with the 3rd INCoS 2011, held on November 30–December 2, 2011 in Fukuoka, Japan. In the first article, Li explains that mobility is an important issue that deters people living in remote areas and elderlies to visit health clinics on a regular basis; this is also the case for individuals with disabilities. Advances in information and telecommunication technologies have been made telemedicine possible. By using the latest sensor technologies, a person’s vital data can be collected in a smart home environment. The bio-information can then be transferred wirelessly or via the Internet to medical databases and the healthcare professionals. The article surveys and compiles the state-of-the-art smart home technologies and telemedicine systems. In the second article, Sakanushi et al. discuss concerns with triage tags, which are widely used at disaster scenes. Some of these concerns include the inability to show the current priorities of casualties and a failure to collect the physiological conditions of the casualties. In their article, authors propose an electronic triage which continuously monitor the vital signs of casualties and transmit them to an electronic triage server. Experimental results show that their proposed electronic triage system can save more lives than the paper triage tags version. In the third article, Furey et al. explain that the use of Wi-Fi signals is an attractive and reasonably affordable option to deal with the currently unsolved problem of widespread tracking in an indoor environment. In their article, authors present a system which aims at overcoming N. Bessis (&) E. Asimakopoulou School of Computing and Mathematics, University of Derby, Kedleston Road, Derby DE22 1GB, UK e-mail: n.bessis@derby.ac.uk