IOPES

Overview

Description

Indoor-Outdoor Positioning for Emergency Staff (IOPES) aims at strengthening the preparedness of civil protection and emergency teams (CPETs) involved in disaster-related operations.

Its targets are: (1) to provide continuous, time-tagged information about the location of CPETs; (2) to create a new feature of an already operational emergency management system (EMS); (3) to rely on existing cartography or new maps; (4) to use its own communication system to avoid the need for existing (possibly damaged/inoperative) infrastructures; (5) to better the decision-making process. The project plans to achieve its targets by conducting a users’ needs assessment, integrating existing indoor/outdoor positioning devices in a wearable unit, and integrating itself in the EMS. Its planned exercises are designed to check the suitability of the entire system. To do this, the consortium includes a research centre and four SMEs. The civil protection entities and related organisations provide their knowledge of high-risk areas, and examples of disasters of natural hazards. The final beneficiaries are civil protection agencies and CPETs.

The first outcome of the project will be an IT-based solution, the enhanced EMS. The data collected by the EMS will lead to the second outcome of IOPES: the dissection of information to trace the behaviour of the teams, linking variables as time, position and events to make a post-mortem analysis of the emergency possible. This could result in developing strategies to improve emergency management.

Partner organisations