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Alexander Müller, Alireza Sahami Shirazi, Florian Alt, Albrecht Schmidt
ZoneTrak: Design and Implementation of an Emergency Management Assistance System
In Pervasive' 10: Adjunct Proceedings of the Eigth International Conference on Pervasive Computing. Helsinki, Finland, May 17-20, 2010. (bib)

Though pervasive computing technologies are omnipresent in our daily lives, emergency cases, such as earthquakes, or fires often cause serious damages to the underlying infrastructure. In such cases rescue units rely on paper maps of the operation areas and important information are broadcasted either from a central unit or from other teams. This information is manually updated on the paper map, not only causing a lot of work but also being a potential source for errors. In this research we implemented a system that provides a positioning system to track forces and allows sharing information in real-time. Rescue units can annotate different zones and broadcast data to other units whose maps are automatically updated with available annotations.We show how such a system can be operated based on an independent infrastructure which makes it robust and reliable in emergency and catastrophe situations.