Support of Future Disaster Response Using Generalized Access Networks (GANs)

Efficient communication and coordination are major challenges experienced by the emergency services (firebrigade, police, ambulance) during the first response to a major incident. A major incident can happen anywhere and at any time, hence support for emergency communications services should be ubiquitous and independent of communication technologies and infrastructure used. We present a vision of how ambient intelligent environments may be used in the future to support the emergency services during first response to a major incident. Support includes enabling emergency communications and biomedical monitoring for front line personnel. In this paper we focus on the possibilities and challenges raised by using the GAN (Generalized Access Network) infrastructure to support ambient intelligent services and emergency services (fire-brigade, police, ambulance) for major incident management.