Real-Time Location Based Determination of Emergency Services Equipment
Kevin Curran
Overview
It is crucial that when emergency response vehicles such as fire engines arrive at incidents that all vital equipment is onboard and thus ready for use. To date, manual techniques are used to account for equipment however this can be haphazard and over the years, there have been many occasions where this system has failed dramatically. Real-Time Location Systems (RTLS) are becoming a important growth in IT. The reasons are obvious in that people and objects can be tracked in real-time. This project seeks to investigate the applicability of tagging equipment and tracking it in real-time modelled on scenarios such as equipment belonging to the fire service.
Rationale
To investigate the feasibility of tagging equipment and monitoring its whereabouts over time and in differing scenarios such as items out of range, items at the bottom of boxes and interference of others items such as metal. The results of the investigation will be of benefit to the wider research community where case studies such as this are absent.
Brief Methodology
This project will seek to investigate the actual problem of missing equipment in emergency services, it will then investigate the existing approaches to the problem. Next it will investigate the possible solutions through real time location systems and then implement a system with the Intelligent Systems Research Centre RFID radar system where items are tagged and tracked in different scenarios in order to determine the feasibility of implementing such a system in real life.