An IoT application for locating victims aftermath of an earthquake

Abstract

This paper presents an Internet of Things (IoT) framework which is specially designed for assisting the research and rescue operations targeted to collapsed buildings aftermath of an earthquake. In general, an IoT network is used to collect and process data from different sources called things. According to the collected data, an IoT system can actuate different mechanisms to react the environment. In the problem at hand, we exploit the IoT capabilities to collect the data about the victims before the building collapses and when it falls down the collected data is processed to generate useful reports which will direct the search and rescue efforts. The proposed framework is tested by a pilot implementation with some simplifications. The initial results and experiences are promising. During the pilot implementation, we observed some issues which are addressed in the proposed IoT framework properly. © 2017 IEEE.