IOPES - Indoor-Outdoor Positioning for Emergency Staff

IOPES aims at strengthening the preparedness of civil protection and emergency teams (CPET) involved in disaster-related operations. The targets are (1) to provide continuous, time-tagged information about the location of CPETs, either indoors or outdoors (2) as a new feature of an already operational emergency management system (EMS), (3) relying in existing cartography, or new maps (fast mapping + Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems (RPAS)) (4) using its own communication system to avoid the need of existing (possibly damaged/inoperative) infrastructures (5) to better the decision-making process.

The following activities are being carried out: users’ needs assessment, integration of existing indoor/outdoor positioning devices in a wearable unit; its integration in the EMS through an API and the use of a portable LTE communication network. Exercises have been planned to check the suitability of the whole system. Communication & dissemination are also part of the project. These activities result in (1) an enhanced EMS able with indoors/outdoors tracking capabilities as well as (2) a protocol to connect the positioning device to other EMSs. To do this the consortium includes a research center, CTTC (ES), 4 SMEs, ATHONET (IT), SAReye (IS), SCARABOT (DE), CATUAV (ES), the FBBR (DK, civil entity), PCF (ES, fire ecology & management); the Civil Protection entities and related organizations provide their knowledge of highriskareas, and examples of disasters of natural hazards. The final beneficiaries are the civil protection agencies and emergency teams.

The first outcome of the project is an IT-based solution, the enhanced EMS mentioned above; the data collected by such an EMS lead to the second outcome of IOPES: the later dissection of such information to trace the behavior of the teams, linking variables as time, position & events,making possible a post-mortem analysis of the emergency and thus the development or refinement of strategies aiming at the improvement of emergency management.

IOPES has received funding from the European Commission, Directorate-General Humanitarian Aid and Civil Protection (ECHO), under the call UCPM-2019-PP-AG