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 operatingover 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 sensors 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 database 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 automatize certain preventive safety-improving actions. In order to find out whether our project is viable, we decided on a real-life approach to establish the benefits that would come from introducing the Lifetch system. Our needs analysis was based on research of the archival materials of the Polish Mountain Rescue Organization. We selected over 200 mountain accident cases from the last 10 years. Over 80 of these cases included fatalities. The outcome of the analysis showed that in 71\% of these cases the effects of accidents could be minimized or even avoided if our system had been deployed. Improvements raising the safety level apply to the following matters: - Any person carrying an ICU can signal an emergency situation and request help even when there is no GSM network coverage. - Our system automatically discovers potentially dangerous situations such as people straying from the safe track and opens more possibilities to react to these situations. - Implementing intelligent position prediction algorithms, the system enables the park rangers to reduce substantially the time of locating a missing person, therefore increasing his/her chances of survival. - The system gives the possibility to monitor and analyze the traffic in national parks or other areas. This can become an important factor while making decisions concerning further safety improvements. It can also be useful for enhancing environment protection. - The system puts a strong emphasis on cooperation of a group of people. Group leader has full information about the status of his/her group, whereas a member can easily locate the group and find the right track even in difficult weather conditions. This can be particularly useful for groups of children on a class trip, tourists hiking with a guide, as well as for a team of rangers performing a rescue operation.
@TECHREPORT { jaskowski04lifetch,
AUTHOR = { Wojciech Ja\'skowski and Krzysztof J\k{e}drzejek and Jan Kniat and Bartosz Nyczkowski and Stanislaw Skowronek },
TITLE = { Lifetch --- Life Saving System },
INSTITUTION = { Poznan University of Technology },
YEAR = { 2004 },
NUMBER = { RA-008/04 },
ADDRESS = { Institute of Computing Science, Poznan University of Technology, Poland },
MONTH = { may },
NOTE = { The winning project of the CSIDC (Computer Science International Design Competition) 2004 Competition },
ABSTRACT = { 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 operatingover 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 sensors 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 database 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 automatize certain preventive safety-improving actions. In order to find out whether our project is viable, we decided on a real-life approach to establish the benefits that would come from introducing the Lifetch system. Our needs analysis was based on research of the archival materials of the Polish Mountain Rescue Organization. We selected over 200 mountain accident cases from the last 10 years. Over 80 of these cases included fatalities. The outcome of the analysis showed that in 71\% of these cases the effects of accidents could be minimized or even avoided if our system had been deployed. Improvements raising the safety level apply to the following matters: - Any person carrying an ICU can signal an emergency situation and request help even when there is no GSM network coverage. - Our system automatically discovers potentially dangerous situations such as people straying from the safe track and opens more possibilities to react to these situations. - Implementing intelligent position prediction algorithms, the system enables the park rangers to reduce substantially the time of locating a missing person, therefore increasing his/her chances of survival. - The system gives the possibility to monitor and analyze the traffic in national parks or other areas. This can become an important factor while making decisions concerning further safety improvements. It can also be useful for enhancing environment protection. - The system puts a strong emphasis on cooperation of a group of people. Group leader has full information about the status of his/her group, whereas a member can easily locate the group and find the right track even in difficult weather conditions. This can be particularly useful for groups of children on a class trip, tourists hiking with a guide, as well as for a team of rangers performing a rescue operation. },
FILE = { jaskowski04lifetch.pdf:\\jaskowski04lifetch.pdf:PDF },
URL = { http://www.cs.put.poznan.pl/wjaskowski/pub/papers/jaskowski04lifetch.pdf },
}