Emergency Services

Applications
Title	Emergency Services
Author(s)	Rui Barradas Pereira.
Level	Basic
Year of Publication	2011

In automobile crashes, one of the most important factors in saving lives is a prompt response from emergency medical services. By improving information transfer between the trauma care physician and emergency medical service personnel they result in faster, more appropriate care, thus saving lives and reducing disabilities resulting from crashes. Traffic incident and emergency management is the planned and coordinated program process to detect, respond to and remove traffic incidents and restore traffic capacity as safely and quickly as possible.

Incident management is a crucial function in the design and deployment of Transportation Management Systems and Traveller Information Systems. It primarily includes incident detection, verification, response, and clearance. Incident detection is a crucial step in incident management; it affects consequent actions and determines the reliability and efficiency of the whole system.

A very important application will be tracking and managing emergency and rescue vehicles. Combined with dynamic traffic information, an ambulance (Europe has 60 000) with a Galileo receiver and communication link will be able to reach its destination much faster. Traffic lights could be controlled to speed the arrival of an emergency vehicle. More than 50% of emergency calls now come from mobile phones, so integral Galileo receivers (as planned by the European E-112 project) will dramatically shorten the rescue chain, gaining time and saving lives.

In-vehicle emergency call systems allow the emergency services to remotely locate vehicles in a difficult situation, resulting from a collision or other distress situations

Application Architecture

Incident detection algorithms may be grouped into two categories: automatic and non-automatic. Automatic algorithms refer to those algorithms that automatically trigger an incident alarm when traffic condition data received from field sensors satisfy certain preset conditions; non-automatic algorithms or procedures are based on human witness reports (i.e., driver-based “sensors”). In order to support the above objectives, it is required to put in place several supporting functionalities: • Fleet Management System for the Assistance Vehicles of the Road-Infrastructure Operator; • A comprehensive integration with the Road-Side Equipment used by the Road-Infrastructure Operator; The targeted application is based on the findings and developments of the ARMAS Phase I and Phase II projects, with the special emphasis on minimizing or eliminating traffic congestion. It will also be necessary to provide a “Command and Control” link with the various Road-Side Equipments (RSE) which are installed in the road infra-structure order to acquire some critical environmental information and to provide information and even “orders” to the users. This may include: • Variable Messages Signals; • Variable Signalization; • Meteorological Stations; • Traffic Counters; • SOS systems; • Video Cameras, both mobile and fixed.

Galileo can increase the security of taxi and bus drivers. Simply pressing a distress button in the event of an attack will immediately alert the police. The Galileo receiver will indicate the position of the vehicle.