Optimal displacement of a mobile telemedicine unit in an urban disaster scenario

John Puentes (1) , Luc Pigeon (2) , René Proulx (3) , Alexandre Bergeron-Guyard (2) , David Belanger (3)

1 ITI - Département Image et Traitement Information
2 DRDC - Defense Research and Development Canada (Defense Research and Development Canada)
3 Thales Canada (Thales Canada)

Mobile telemedicine systems could improve disaster scenario medical response, serving to cope partly with the crucial insufficiency of resources. Mobility is useful to provide the essential remotely assisted care to victims where they were found, in addition to evacuate them. Deciding mobile units’ intervention adds to the complexity of disaster response coordination. This paper reports on our research work for the development of a geographic aware application that we propose to use as a decision-support tool to optimise mobile unit displacements in dynamic environments. Four simulated scenarios were used to test the system anticipation capacity to face evolving threat conditions (toxic cloud dispersion). Results show how the trajectories are flexibly adjusted according to identified constraints.

Mots clés: Mobile telemedicine; Threats management; Disaster scenario; Optimal path; Graphs

Domaines: Traitement du signal et de l'image [eess.SP]

John Puentes, Luc Pigeon, René Proulx, Alexandre Bergeron-Guyard, David Belanger. Optimal displacement of a mobile telemedicine unit in an urban disaster scenario. International Journal of Biomedical Engineering and Technology (IJBET), 2009, 2 (1), pp.44 - 73. ⟨10.1504/IJBET.2009.021907⟩. ⟨hal-02166948⟩