Patient-centric hurricane evacuation management system

Abstract

Abstract-In the United States, there has been a high incidence of hurricanes over the past decade. Before a hurricane makes landfall it is important, for safety, that people who live in potentially dangerous areas, such as along the coast, evacuate. Nursing homes have an even greater concern during an evacuation as the patients are primarily elderly or disabled, and require additional assistance. In this paper we investigate the characteristics and challenges associated with hurricane evacuation of health care centers, such as nursing homes. Then, we propose a patient centric hurricane evacuation management system that allow healthcare providers to continuously monitor and track patients. The hardware and software architecture, and the main operations are presented. The proposed system is able to operate in difficult conditions, such as lack of basic communication services such as cellular and Internet, temporary network partition, and scarce energy resources.Keywords: wireless body area network, architecture design, hurricane evacuation management system, energy efficiency.

Critical Time, Space, and Decision‐Making Agent Considerations in Human‐Centered Interdisciplinary Hurricane‐Related Research

“…Passive data collection technologies (e.g., GPS, medical sensors, RFID tags) make the burden on individuals low, essential since they are occupied by hazard concerns. Examples include Ambrose et al (2010) who examine broadening the use of medical sensors on nursing home patients to help monitor them as they are evacuated and Chatfield et al (2010) who consider RFID tags to provide E-Government support to vulnerable individuals during an evacuation.…”

“…Examples include Ambrose et al. (2010), who examine broadening the use of medical sensors on nursing home patients to help monitor them as they are evacuated, and Chatfield et al. (2010), who consider RFID tags to provide E‐government support to vulnerable individuals during an evacuation.…”

“…In terms of spatial scale, a significant focus of such research is on supporting local decision making for hurricane evacuations, both on the decision support systems side (Chatfield, Wamba, & Tatano, 2010; Javed et al., 2010; Zhou, Yeh, Chang, Marquess, & Zezeski, 2005) and on the social media analytics side (Daily & Starbird, 2014; Hughes & Chauhan, 2015), since that is where a vast majority of the actionable information is generated and consumed. With respect to the temporal scale, most studies are focused on decision support or on situational awareness as a hurricane event approaches and progresses, thus much of the data are continuous (sensor data) or time series data (periodic observations), with the exception of the underlying data that establish initial conditions or population characteristics (Ambrose, Cardei, & Cardei, 2010; Ozguven & Ozbay, 2015).…”