The paper analyzes relevant concepts for command & control effectiveness in the German disaster response system. The concepts are derived from legal text review, an analogy between military and disaster response domain and interpretations of representatives from major German disaster response organizations. The concepts are integrated into a conceptual model.

About the lead author (Dr Weiner): I am a pediatric emergency medicine physician at Children’s Hospital Boston (CHB)/Harvard Medical School (HMS) and the CHB representative and a chartermember of the HMS Section on Disaster Medicine. I have been a National Disaster Medical Systemmember on the Disaster Medical Assistance Team, the International Medical Surgical Response Team, and the Pediatric S...

Given the personal and societal costs associated with acute impairment and enduring post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), the mental health response to disasters is an integral component of disaster response planning. The purpose of this paper is to explore the compatibility between cognitive-behavioral psychology and the disaster mental health model, and explicate how cognitive-behavioral per...

OBJECTIVE Children account for 30 percent of the US population; as a result, many victims of disaster events are children. The most critically injured pediatric victims would be best cared for in a tertiary care pediatric hospital. The Children's Hospital Association (CHA) undertook a survey of its members to determine their level of readiness to respond to a mass casualty disaster. DESIGN Th...

Social media becomes a communicating channel during a natural disaster for detecting disaster events because people share their opinions, feelings, activity during the disaster through the Twitter. Twitter is not simply a platform for broadcasting information, but one of informational interaction. So, we use this platform for mining various disaster relevant tweets during a natural disaster. We...

Disaster response robotics is an important and growing application domain in robotics. Robotics researchers and the general public are increasingly aware of disaster response and rescue robotics due to the presence of disaster response robots at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear power plant. Research in disaster response robotics focuses on core areas related to safety, security, and rescue applica...