Future Securtiy 2010

Emergencies arise out of disaster and are characterized by limited resources. Effective deployment of help is crucial, but only possible if a common operational picture among autorities, co-ordination centers, and staff working in the field is developed as quickly as possible.

Since mass casualty incidents (MCIs) normally overwhelm the regularly available rescue resources (rescue personnel, transport vehicles, hospital capacity, etc.) a particularly effective crisis management has to be applied. Coordination centers, decision makers, and rescue forces need information as quickly as possible on type and severity of injuries so that each affected or injured person gets optimal care.In general, for coordination centers it is a challenge to get an immediate and accurate situation overview (i.e. number of victims, categories and their location) automatically leading to sub-optimality in deploying (additional) forces. Indeed, triage and registration performed at different places by different teams maintaining different lists which in turn have to be sorted manually is indubitably an error-prone approach. Furthermore, it can happen that all later attempts to track the way of single patients, their attendants and transport vehicles are not very successful although this could be of key interest in scenarios with nuclear, biological or chemical hazards.

Paper-based triage and registration systems for organizing MCIs are still state-of-the-art because they are robust and their usage is intuitive. Nevertheless the main drawback is that information about affected persons remains among the persons themselves, making disaster management considerably more difficult. Data can be duplicated/aggregated by manually copying triage tags only, which is a laborious and time-consuming manual process, and the normal medium for exchanging information are voice-based radio systems. Besides tracing single persons passing the different stations of the rescue chain is practically not possible.

The e-Triage concept consists of four main elements: autonomous communication infrastrucutre, electronic data recording, a distributed database system, and a psychological acceptance and usability research. The e-Triage system comprises a satellite-based communication system with terrestrial radio cells that can be installed locally, matching end devices with dedicated softwares for the registration of victims, and a distributed, self-synchronizing database system guaranteeing maximal availability without a single point of failure.

"The interdicziplinary and integrated research is crucial for the success of the project. The end-users needs and anxieties using new technolgies are necessary attaching importance" so Tine Adler in her conclusion.