June 07, 2000
June 07, 2000
Story by Judy Holmes
Contact: 443-3784
jlholmes@syr.edu
SU researchers team up with international agencies for international humanitarian and disaster relief training exercise
A team of researchers from the Center for Really Neat Research (CRNR) at Syracuse University will participate in Strong Angel, the first-ever international humanitarian assistance and disaster relief training exercise, June 10-15 in Waimea on the island of Hawaii.
Strong Angel is designed to provide a realistic training scenario for civilian and military participants, teaching them how to coordinate efforts, and to collaborate and communicate with each other, during a large-scale natural or humanitarian disaster. The exercise will give participants opportunities to test cutting-edge information technology in an austere environment.
Organizations participating in Strong Angel include the U.S. Navy's Third Fleet, the American Red Cross, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the World Food Bank and UNICEF. The event is being held in cooperation with RIMPAC 2000, the largest maritime military exercise in the Pacific, taking place in the waters off Hawaii through July 6. Seven nations, including the United States, are participating in the RIMPAC event.
CRNR's role in Strong Angel will be to establish a distributed medical intelligence communications infrastructure at a mock refugee camp, according to David Warner, CRNR director and SU research professor. About 125 civilian Red Cross volunteers will act as Strong Angel refugees. "We will be providing medical communications from the refugee camp using technologies we and others have developed," he says.
Medical information gathered at the camp will be transmitted to the Civil Military Operations Center, located two miles away, and to medical centers all over the world, using some of the latest global communications technologies. The goal is to extend the reach of medial specialists via telemedicine, computers and communication technology, says Edward Lipson, SU professor of physics and CRNR researcher.
Strong Angel will provide an opportunity for CRNR to field test its latest technology: E.V.A. (Experiential Video/Audio) a device designed to allow interactive communications between medics in the field and physicians located miles away. E.V.A. instantly transmits a patientıs vital statistics to a central location through sensors on the medicıs fingers and a video camera worn on the head. The information can be used to make immediate medical treatment decisions, and the information can be saved for future tracking and assessment.
In addition to deploying and testing distributed medical intelligence systems, organizers will be conducting studies and experiments in many other areas, including humanitarian information management systems, one- and two-way computerized translation and information systems, interactive paging systems, and civil-military communications and alternative power systems in disaster situations. The Translingual Information Dissemination, Extraction and Summarization (TIDES) portal will also be tested for the first time in a field environment. TIDES provides near real-time datagathered from various open sources around the worldto decision-makers addressing world crises.
"During Strong Angel, we will be creating a system that will be used in response to a global disaster," Warner says. "The experiences we gather will help us develop methods for a globally deployable, humanitarian communications system. By training and understanding the problems, we can create the technologies needed to avert a humanitarian crisis."