Better computing, communication for emergency personnel at disaster sites

Doug Ramsey in the UC San Diego News Center: ….Hurricane Katrina. The Southeast Asian tsunami. Now the killer earthquake in Haiti, which has claimed upwards of 50,000 lives. In each case, the response to a natural disaster has been further complicated by the difficulty delivering medical care in a chaotic environment where the communications infrastructure on the ground is seriously damaged or completely destroyed.

To address that problem, researchers at the University of California, San Diego have launched a project to find better ways for emergency officials and first responders to talk to each other and share data on the ground at the scene of a natural or man-made disaster – even when the local communications infrastructure is out of commission.

Approximately $1.5 million annually over two years in “stimulus” funding under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) from the National Library of Medicine (NLM) will underwrite the WIISARD SAGE project. NLM is one of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The new project picks up where the original Wireless Internet Information System for Medical Response in Disasters (WIISARD) left off. That four-year project (2004-08) developed a testbed consisting of devices and software for use by first responders and command center personnel dealing with triage and other medical decisions after a disaster. Building on the WIISARD testbed, the new project (SAGE stands for “Self-scaling Architecture for Group and Enterprise Computing”) will explore group or collaborative computing in mobile environments, as well as self-scaling systems for disaster management (no matter how many personnel and agencies respond to a disaster).

The new project brings together an interdisciplinary team of faculty – most of whom also worked on the original WIISARD – from computer science, cognitive science, electrical engineering and emergency medicine in the UCSD division of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2).

“As the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti has demonstrated so starkly, communication is a critical ingredient in any medical response to a disaster,” said William Griswold, principal investigator on the WIISARD SAGE project and a professor in the Computer Science and Engineering department of UCSD’s Jacobs School of Engineering. “A critical issue for disaster response is group or collaborative computing in mobile environments. With this new project, we hope to overcome several inter-related problems that inhibit the successful use of information technologies at disaster sites to manage medical care.”…

An uptown house in New Orleans, with the front wall blown off by Katrina's winds. Shot by Infrogmation, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic license.