No abstract

An ambulance is the type of emergency vehicle that, in order, to accomplish its mission of transporting patients in critical condition to hospitals, they must run as fast as they can through a city streets' maze. Hence, it is necessary a real-time system that could obtain anytime ambulance location. Moreover, it should advice on the best routes based on speed and time for achieve the target, given that the survival of the patients depends on the efficiency of this service. In a city like Sao Paulo in Brazil, for example, during the night, there may be hundreds or even thousands of ambulances running in the city, thus knowing the precise location of these vehicles is quite important. Despite these needs, the process of acquire and identifying the position of every ambulance can be costly if it is based on a GPS on every ambulance and a dedicated communication system. Therefore, we address these challenges in this paper with a low-cost solution based on the Android ® Smartphone platform. Thus, we developed:(1) a low-cost integrated GSM antenna probing module that perform continuous wireless "war-driving" and triangulation to estimate the ambulance position accurately, (2) another module to send encrypted messages through SMS service containing the position information to a central (3) a visualization module allowing real-time analysis of ambulances mobility on the city map.

Ubiquitous Computing has enabled seamless access to a wide variety of services and Internet-based applications anywhere, anytime, and using any device. These capacities along with the recent advances of wireless communication technologies allowed the development of the so-called locationbased systems. However, building these systems can be a complex and expensive task, mainly due to the need to manage and maintain communication among the various entities that make up this type of system (e.g. devices, application servers, spatial databases, terminals, base-stations). In e-Health domain, where time and information accuracy can determine the success or failure of a medical emergency care, the demand for robust and accurate location-based systems has led to the need for new technologies that improve the processing and delivery of location data. Hence, this paper proposes a Service Layer which supports building Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) Positioning Systems. The Service Layer enables interoperability among the different entities through the use of services. These services provide functionalities for position data processing and user interface adaptation for visualization in various mobile devices according to the interaction context. A case study illustrating the use of the Service Layer in an application for tracking ambulances has been conducted in order to investigate the feasibility of the proposal.