Understanding the performance of disaster monitoring systems is a key to understanding their success, therefore; various qualitative and quantitative measures and metrics can be applied in the characterization and analysis of such systems. Through evaluation studies, problems that impede a disaster monitoring system performance can be identified. The results can be used for system control, desi...

Experiences with past major disasters tell us that people with wireless devices and social network services can serve effectively as mobile human sensors. A disaster warning and response system can solicit eye-witness reports from selected participants and use information provided by them to supplement surveillance sensor coverage. This paper describes several formulations of the participant se...

The devastation of New Orleans as a result of Hurricane Katrina presents an opportunity and an obligation to examine the human and social factors that influenced the nation’s response to this disaster. Lessons from Katrina suggest that a social marketing approach to disaster management could increase the likelihood of positive outcomes for individuals and communities when a disaster strikes. Th...

PURPOSE Dental hygienists can fill critical roles during mass fatality incidents in the area of disaster victim identification, providing much needed support to forensic odontologists. The purpose of this paper is to bring awareness that research is needed to assess current dental hygiene programs, continuing education opportunities and the type of approach being used to develop and implement p...

OBJECTIVE The provision of sophisticated medical care in an austere environment is challenging. During and after a mass casualty event, it is likely that critical care services will be needed beyond an intensive care unit (ICU) setting. The objective of this article is to explore existing ICU care systems such as military aeromedical transport that may be applicable to disaster medicine and to ...

Vulnerability assessment and reduction are now central to developing a holistic and integrated approach to disaster risk reduction, including mitigating the effects of a disaster. Pre-existing frameworks for mapping vulnerability and planning response to disasters do not completely fit the realities of rural communities in low income countries where most people informally organize their own liv...

The standard definition of risk and disaster can be likened to “being hit by lightning”. This has two different meanings. One is unpredictability because it does not occur through known mechanisms, and the other is that it is difficult to clearly analyze the events because cause and effect are statistically “independent” of each other (cf. International Organization for Standardization 31000). ...

BACKGROUND From a global perspective, natural disasters are common events. Published research highlights that a significant minority of exposed children and adolescents develop disaster-related mental health syndromes and associated functional impairment. Consistent with the considerable unmet need of children and adolescents with regard to psychopathology, there is strong evidence that many ch...

In this paper, we draw on serious mixed reality games as an approach to explore and design for coordination in disaster response scenarios. We introduce AtomicOrchid, a real-time location-based game to explore coordination and agile teaming under temporal and spatial constraints according to our approach. We outline the research plan to study the various interactional arrangements in which huma...

When stricken by a catastrophic natural disaster, the efficiency of disaster response operation is very critical to life saving. However, communication systems, including cellular networks, were usually crashed due to various causes making the coordination among a large number of disorganized disaster response workers extremely difficult. Unfortunately, rapid deployment of an emergency communic...