AIDnet:: Adaptive Intelligent Distributed Networking Platform To Support Next Generation Emergency Response

The recent wave of mass casualties plaguing the public safety community showed that the incident commander s situational awareness of the first responders can be quickly and easily overwhelmed. At emergency scenes, with the overburdened first responders and unreliable communication infrastructure, the lack of accurate and timely information creates an organizational nightmare for incident commanders responsible for the wellbeing of their team. Experience from serious emergency events prompted our team to collaborate with multiple emergency response jurisdictions in the Greater Washington Capital Region to develop a self-organizing wireless body area network sensor platform, as an antidote to this pernicious situation akin to the fog of war. This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will prove the feasibility of creating AIDnet, a cost-effective, rapidly deployable, and reconfigurable wireless first responder monitoring solution to facilitate emergency personnel monitoring, tracking, and resource coordination. With this grant, we will create a feasibility plan for the following key enabling components of AIDnet: (1) ultra low power mote-based embedded hardware (2) distributed ad-hoc wireless communication network and (3) a software reconfigurable frameworks to enable customized body area networks.