Privacy conscious architecture for improving emergency response in smart cities

With advancements in wireless technologies, location based services (LBS) have become ubiquitous and are fundamental to services that provide emergency response to those that enhance the quality of daily life. Location tracking applications include traffic congestion management, waste management, indoor navigation in malls/airports, receiving coupons/advertisements by retailers, applications to allow parents to track their children, providing centimeter-level guidance to visually impaired users in indoor environments etc. Location tracking also enables applications in device-free situations - intrusion detection by means of tracking people and their movements through walls, monitoring the heartbeat of a person(ex: elderly citizen) through walls etc. In conjunction with location based services, the development of the Internet of Things (IoT) provides rich contextual information which is key to the scalability of smart cities. Managing these technologies along with establishing effective countermeasures against security and privacy concerns of individual citizens as well as service providers and government agencies is essential for their adoption. In this paper we envision a feature of the emergency response system of a smart city whereby critical contextual information from the emergency site is made available to the emergency service provider to enable effective first response strategy. We use the example of a smart building with an infrastructure that consists of an indoor hybrid wireless environment for identifying individuals, tracking their location, monitoring vital statistics and measuring ambient conditions. This information is critical to rescue teams and paramedics. We provide an architecture that addresses the security and privacy issues associated with the highly sensitive information generated by this system.