RescueAid: Smartphone-Aided Situational Awareness For Emergency Response

This demonstration paper presents the RescueAid platform, that leverages the collective intelligence of edge devices by using spatio-temporal data readily available on modern smartphones (i.e., camera, GPS, and inertial sensor measurements) to deliver situational awareness during emergency response operations. Within the RescueAid mobile application, popular machine learning (ML) frameworks are deployed with pretrained models for object detection and image segmentation and used to automatically annotate and tag collected images from the field. RescueAid will be demonstrated in two modes: (i) Interactive mode, where attendees will be able to walk around outside the conference venue carrying RescueAid-enabled smartphones to generate sample data that will be automatically shared and displayed on the web platform interface and (ii) Trace-driven mode, where attendees will have the opportunity to visualize on the platform’s user interface the location traces and associated images collected during a real field exercise.