How RFID may help Rescue Workers and Fire Fighters
On Sunday, there was a major earthquake in Fukuoka, Japan.
There seem to be virtually no place in Japan that is not vulnerable to out-of-the-blue earthquakes.
Japanese government is keen to explore uses of new technologies for helping victims and people who help victims in disaster situations. RFID is not an exception in this respect.
For example, Japanese Fire Defense Agency has been testing location systems for firefighters since 2000. The system uses portable RFID readers worn by firefighters that obtain location information from active tags embedded in underground environments.
Riken's five-year project (since 2002) exploits RFID tags with large memory capacity for storing sound.ĦĦTheir ideas include embedding such tags in ceilings and walls in buildings. The sound stored in the tags include some messages for the victims and also messages recorded by the victims. If buildings are collapsed after an earthquake, some kind of flying machines will send/receive information to/from the tags.
NICT's five-year project (since 2003) uses RFID tags embedded in roadsides - they are used by rescue workers (perhaps including volunteers?) carrying RFID readers in order to share important information such as "if person X is alive or not " and other information related to a disaster.
Also - the city of Fukuoka and Kyushu University recently announced a new project that explore uses of RFID tags for efficiently managing victims' information. Here, RFID tags will be attached to paper forms that describe victims' information. (The earthquake hit the region before this system is actually deployed ...)
via
- Best Practices, Ubiquitous Networking Forum, in Japanese.
- Fire Defense Agency's report in Japanese
- Riken's project description page in Japanese
- Mainichi-MSN, March 7, 2005, in Japanese