An Experimental System for Continuous Users Tracking in Emergency Scenarios

In emergency scenarios, like those following a earthquake, road accident in tunnel, large fire and so on, the possibility to track personnel engaged in providing first aid and rescue services is of paramount importance, also in order to promptly manage unexpected and potentially hazardous situations. While in open areas the precision, accuracy and availability of GPS service is enough in most cases, in partially obstructed environments, such as urban canyon, or indoor, GPS service is not available or the quality of provided estimates could be quite coarse. While the literature reports a lot of solutions able to overcome these limitations of the GPS system in standard settings, in emergency scenarios these solutions could be partially or completely unavailable, raising serious concerns about their suitability in these situations. In this paper, we propose a localization and tracking system based on the usage of IEEE 802.11 technology for augmenting the GPS coverage where it is scarce, and to completely substitute it where it is missing, e.g. indoor. The system is characterized by ease of deployment and usage by non-technical personnel, such as that engaged in rescue services in emergency scenarios. In order to assess the feasibility of the proposed solution, we implemented a proof-of-concepts prototype made up of low-cost commercial off-the-shelf components. The preliminary performance tests we performed confirm the effectiveness of proposed system.