Location Awareness Rescue System: Support for Mountain Rescue Teams

Aiding the efficient collaboration and coordination of rescue teams is a difficult task especially in a mountainous region. Challenges emerge from quickly alerting and debriefing rescuers, to deploying them effectively, and also coordinating and monitoring them in the rural search domain. Knowing the exact location of the rescuers and vehicles involved in a mountain search and rescue mission is a key element for the successful progress of the mission and aids the mission coordinator, who usually stays at the headquarters, to take fast and informed decisions. In this paper we present the devised Location Awareness Rescue System that targets the aforementioned challenges, and provides location information and updates of the rescuers in a real time manner as they are deployed in the rescue domain overlaid onto interactive maps. The results from our tests show that our system is a proficient presence management solution that can provide precise location information by recovering from any periodic or total connectivity loss, and also improve and support mountain rescue teams leading to more effective and successful missions.