Public Safety Communications Europe Kicks-Off Search & Rescue Project
Emerging technologies for the Early location of Entrapped victims under Collapsed Structures and Advanced Wearables for risk assessment and First Responders Safety in SAR operations.
The Kick-Off of the H2020 Search & Rescue (S&R) project officially took place on 21-22 July 2020. The meeting, which took place remotely and gathered 85 registered participants from 28 organisations across Europe, gave S&R partners the opportunity to meet and present their work plan for the initial phase of the project.
About Search & Rescue
Both man-made and natural disasters such as earthquakes and terrorist attacks can result in people being trapped under debris and collapsed structures. In these critical situations, a timely and effective response is crucial and can prevent or significantly reduce the risk of casualties. This is why First responders and rescue teams need to be equipped with cutting edge tools and specialised instrumentations in order to enhance their capabilities, namely in terms of accuracy, quick localization, and reduction of false alarms.
The S&R project will design, implement and test through a series of large scale pilot scenarios a highly interoperable open architecture platform for first responders enhancing their decision making and providing a dynamic common operational picture of the crisis. The S&R platform will allow to easily incorporate next generation solutions and equipment and can be split into the following categories:
- Front-End equipment systems and collection tools, which are mainly based on technologies employed in the crisis scenarios in order to acquire relevant and sensible information in real time (e.g. sensors, drones, rescue robots, smart glasses smart uniforms, first aid for kids’ device characterized by the usage of innovative textile materials, first aid devices, and masks).
- Data Fusion and Mediation Systems, which will fuse the information coming from those heterogeneous sources and will provide a more detailed and accurate situational\context awareness to the decision makers and to the command centres.
- Back-End applications, services and portals, which will provide decision support capabilities to crisis stakeholders. The platform will be equipped with heterogeneous autonomous assets and sensors that provide various sources of data, indoor positioning and extensions of communications efficiently by employing swarming behaviours.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 882897
