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Using Smartphones to Locate Trapped Victims in Disasters

Large and unaccounted numbers of victims in disasters, events, or fires are often trapped in buildings or debris, and must be located and rescued as soon as possible. This study transforms smartphones into indoor locating tools without extra modification or complicated program installation, consider...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Tai, Yenpo, Yu, Teng-To
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9572018/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36236601
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s22197502
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author Tai, Yenpo
Yu, Teng-To
author_facet Tai, Yenpo
Yu, Teng-To
author_sort Tai, Yenpo
collection PubMed
description Large and unaccounted numbers of victims in disasters, events, or fires are often trapped in buildings or debris, and must be located and rescued as soon as possible. This study transforms smartphones into indoor locating tools without extra modification or complicated program installation, considering smartphones are likely to be carried when disasters strike. The study creates a system that converts smartphones into a lifesaving tool for trapped victims and rescuers. This study employs the Bluetooth beacon in smartphones to send signals using its low power consumption feature. The signal could continue transmitting for rescuers to locate trapped victims for longer. Rescuers could use the Bluetooth function on a regular notebook computer to search such signals without any hardware implementation or modification, allowing them to locate and determine the position of many trapped victims simultaneously. Implementing this system will decrease the search and rescue team’s need to enter unsafe areas and increase their rescue speed, a critical factor for the survival of trapped victims. Furthermore, when disasters strike, the smartphone calling function might not work, and the trapped victim might be too weak to call for help. Thus, autoreply messages from victims’ smartphones could help them be located within a 2-m error, even if covered by fallen debris such as wood piles or tiles. This effort will increase the chance of finding trapped victims within the golden rescue hours and reduce the exposure time of search and rescue teams in unsafe environments.
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spelling pubmed-95720182022-10-17 Using Smartphones to Locate Trapped Victims in Disasters Tai, Yenpo Yu, Teng-To Sensors (Basel) Article Large and unaccounted numbers of victims in disasters, events, or fires are often trapped in buildings or debris, and must be located and rescued as soon as possible. This study transforms smartphones into indoor locating tools without extra modification or complicated program installation, considering smartphones are likely to be carried when disasters strike. The study creates a system that converts smartphones into a lifesaving tool for trapped victims and rescuers. This study employs the Bluetooth beacon in smartphones to send signals using its low power consumption feature. The signal could continue transmitting for rescuers to locate trapped victims for longer. Rescuers could use the Bluetooth function on a regular notebook computer to search such signals without any hardware implementation or modification, allowing them to locate and determine the position of many trapped victims simultaneously. Implementing this system will decrease the search and rescue team’s need to enter unsafe areas and increase their rescue speed, a critical factor for the survival of trapped victims. Furthermore, when disasters strike, the smartphone calling function might not work, and the trapped victim might be too weak to call for help. Thus, autoreply messages from victims’ smartphones could help them be located within a 2-m error, even if covered by fallen debris such as wood piles or tiles. This effort will increase the chance of finding trapped victims within the golden rescue hours and reduce the exposure time of search and rescue teams in unsafe environments. MDPI 2022-10-03 /pmc/articles/PMC9572018/ /pubmed/36236601 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s22197502 Text en © 2022 by the authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Tai, Yenpo
Yu, Teng-To
Using Smartphones to Locate Trapped Victims in Disasters
title Using Smartphones to Locate Trapped Victims in Disasters
title_full Using Smartphones to Locate Trapped Victims in Disasters
title_fullStr Using Smartphones to Locate Trapped Victims in Disasters
title_full_unstemmed Using Smartphones to Locate Trapped Victims in Disasters
title_short Using Smartphones to Locate Trapped Victims in Disasters
title_sort using smartphones to locate trapped victims in disasters
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9572018/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36236601
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s22197502
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