Bracelet to aid in disaster relief
Posted on August 30, 2007
Two years ago this month, the category five Hurricane Katrina devastated not only those living in Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi, but the entire country. Worse than the actual storm itself was the aftermath of families trying to locate and ensure the safety of their loved ones. People, many alone, were relocated to shelters around the country, unsure of the whereabouts of their family and friends. JMU faculty and students felt they needed to do their part.
According to RFID Informatics, Inc., over 330,000 families were removed from their home and over half of them moved into Salvation Army and Red Cross shelters.
“Different agencies have different ways of trying to correlate who is where and it didn’t work out,” Dr. Anthony A. Teate, a professor of ISAT said. “As a matter of fact, there were about 1,200 kids separated from their families during the first week. We saw an opportunity to use technology as a means to mitigate that process.”
JMU graduate and RFID employee Renee Parilak agreed with Dr. Teate.
“We followed it really closely right after it happened,” she said. “And we kept saying ‘they’re using technology but not the right way.’”
Determined to improve the process of reuniting families following a natural disaster, Teate and Parilak created software that would aid victims.
“We came up with the idea of using RFID (Radio Frequency Identification),” Teate said. “A person would wear a bracelet that acts as a transmitter. A scanner reads the tag at a shelter or evacuation center and sends notification that that ID appeared at that location.”
Once a the misplaced person’s bracelet is scanned, their location is then in the system and can easily be discovered by their family members hundreds of miles away in a different shelter. The bracelets run on battery for about five years, according to Teate.
“Before anything happens, people would buy a bracelet and register it in a central database along with who they are related to,” he said. “If somebody is marked missing during an evacuation, then a notification is sent out to the family when the person is located.”
For the protection of the victims, only family members, police, or members of authority such as the government are allowed access to one’s whereabouts.
Not only does the Disaster Identification Bracelet System locate missing persons more efficiently, Parliak also said it facilitates food and supply distribution.
“You can also use it for tracking how many people are at each center, so that helps with food and supply distribution,” she said. “We are eventually hoping to allow users to enter important medical information into the system.”
As of now, research funds are flowing in from both RFID Informatics, Inc. and the Institute for Infrastructure and Information Assurance (IIIA) at JMU. However, the team hopes to receive more funding in order to expand their system nationally.
“The purpose of getting that funding was to prove that it works and then the next stage is to get further funding on a bigger scale,” Parilak said.
On Aug. 23, IIIA sponsored a trial run simulation using 30 JMU and Harrisonburg High School students as “separated families” during a natural disaster.
“We actually told the students they should imagine they were in a real case scenario and in a situation like that…we had to make phone calls and there were problems reaching people but in terms of the technology working itself we were really pleased,” Teate said.
There are currently three scanner systems in Teate’s laboratory in the ISAT building, which are easily deployable at any location with an internet connection, and would identify people wearing registered bracelets in case of natural disaster.
On Nov. 2, the trio will attend the Virginia Innovation Showcase hosted by George Mason University to present their idea and hopefully receive further funding to continue their project.
“We put together a plan of what we thought would be the next step so with this Virginia Innovation Showcase and other places,” Teate said. “The next step is to get some money so we can make the system more proficient and then our next step is to increase the scope of the simulation. We want to make our two-cent contribution.”