µHandS: Architecture for Ubiquitous Help and Safety Services in Emergencies

Pakistan currently does not possesses any state of the art centralized command and control system which can dispense assistance to its citizen in times of emergencies with optimum efficiency. In addition, there is a lack of collaboration among participating organization due bureaucracy and technological limitation. The government as well as the law enforcement agencies realizes that there is a fundamental need to provide its citizens with an emergency management system which will allow them to access timely assistance from the law enforcement agencies in the times of emergencies. We propose a solution that leverages existing GSM infrastructure and does not require citizen to purchase any new hardware to access emergency services. The system that is currently under development will assist in identifying the location where emergency assistance is required. The system allows for increased safety and timely help for the citizens. The system will record and archive data that can be used in identifying movement of the emergency teams in real-time and generate reports of their performance based on the information collected through their mobile phones. Service oriented architecture and use of semantic web technologies is making it easy to collaborate, interoperate, and reuse the existing services among multiple departments. We have used the combination of the state of the art SOA, Semantic web and ICT technologies to build the architecture for the ubiquitous emergency management system.