Regardless of fast development of technology and human knowledge, year by year statistics of accident casualties in sparsely populated areas often visited by hikers, such as national parks and mountainous terrains, remain high. Existing safety precautions are clearly insufficient. Our research showed that there is currently no system operating over a vast area that improves safety through fast and effective reaction to an emergency situation regardless of the type of the accident and capability of the user to call for help. As of now, lack of feedback from people under threat or those near them makes detecting emergencies virtually impossible.
Numerous consultations, brainstorming sessions and a needs analysis led us to the idea of designing the system solving many of these problems - Lifetch. It is based on distributed personal units (we call them ICUs - Intelligent Communication Units (pronounced as "I see you") that we designed and built. They combine modules such as: a GPS receiver, a Radio Frequency (RF) transceiver and ensors that measure temperature, ambient light and acceleration. These lightweight units carried by people under protection of the Lifetch system communicate with each other over RF and exchange information gathered from the sources mentioned above. The ICUs periodically transmit their data to the Command Center using GSM/GPRS/UMTS (later denoted GPRS as the most practical choice) or, should it fail, the message passing system ad-hoc network) working on a RF. The Command Center is the heart of our system and maintains its global status. It stores the information acquired from the ICUs in the atabase and processes it through several subsystems. The goal of these activities is to help the operator ensure the safety of the people protected by the system and utomatize certain preventive safety-improving actions.