Traceability, Acknowledgment, Identification and Management of Disasters Victims – TRIAGE

Partners have worked in parallel for specifications, social study, data protection and privacy. Technical developments have started once those studies advanced enough, for consistency reasons.

Real success for SAMU exercise:
- field reality: this will help the consortium for technical and ergonomic decisions for the rest of the project,
- TRIAGE concept has been demonstrated towards operational: feedback has been positive.
- Face and fingerprint acquisitions have been realised in order to help the work on algorithms.
The future project Law « Gorce » on biometric can potentially interfere with some tools and methods integrated in TRIAGE.
Advisory board met for the first time, mostly composed of end users.

To apply the complete system TRIAGE during the next two exercises organised by the SAMU.
To communicate the results towards the end users
To apply the results in real operations

Article and poster WISG 2014
Conference on «Identity, identification«, Université d’Artois 13/12/2013: «Administrative and judicial identification of victims and implicated.«

TRIAGE (Traceability, Acknowledgement, Identification and Management of Disasters Victims) is a research project aiming to an identity management solution for a large number of victims (any person, living or lifeless) during and after a disaster (natural, accidental or malevolent). The proposed solution is mobile, communicating, flexible, efficient, ergonomic and secured. The solution is designed to meet expectations of first responders, when encountering numerous victims. When facing a mass population situation after a natural disaster (such as Katrina hurricane, tsunami in Thailand, earthquake in Italy or Haiti, triple disaster in Japan, earthquake in Turkey, etc.), after a terrorist attack (Madrid, London, Moscow, Oslo/Utøya, etc.) or after an accident (Concordia, Port Saïd, Furiani, etc.), rescues services are required to identify all victims (conscious, unconscious, or lifeless) to build up and manage identity, medical and administrative files.
TRIAGE is especially designed to bring an efficient solution in a situation of a disaster generating movements of large numbers of victims (hundreds up to thousands of them). Victims could be injured, unconscious, or lifeless. The living victims are usually not carrying any identity documents while they are fleeing the area. TRIAGE thus aims to provide a complete, compact and ergonomic set of tools required for the rescuing services to help those victims. When a disaster occurs, rescuers have to face an important flow of disoriented and frightened people that they need to census immediately. TRIAGE provides an efficient mean of identity management in order to allow rescuers to concentrate their efforts on the victims themselves.
TRIAGE will design a scalable infrastructure based on a mobile platform and a set of inter connected mobile devices. The device will provide the first responders with powerful tools to carry their activity (sorting of injuries and related level of urgency, identification and position). It will support contactless biometric data capture of the victims (fingerprints, face) on low cost sensors, allowing in the same time a speech transcription of the rescuer describing the victim medical state, including a translation capability for missions abroad, a geo-location capability and time-stamping. All those functionalities will be integrated in a simple and intuitive ergonomic design, and a step by step guidance for the using of the device. TRIAGE is very cautious to protect the confidentiality of data and give ethical attention to the respect of privacy. The collected data will be recorded in a temporary local database, gathered during the rescue operation and stored at the mobile platform level, solely maintained during the medical follow up of the victims and securely destroyed afterward. Crucial information on the victim will be stored on a RFID chip (face and fingerprint templates, medical file), carried by the victims.
The mobile platform will assist first responders’ actions, will detect position of the handheld devices, and will gather the flow of collected data from the victims. The platform will also be able to consolidate the victims' identity by securely transferring information to a backbone infrastructure (e.g. by transferring ID, medical and administrative data to the hospital).
The rescuers will conduct the operations by following defined procedures. If the secured wireless network is available, the mobile devices will remain connected with the mobile platform. If the network is not available, all the information will be processed locally and stored into the device and on the RFID chip. Geo-location will always be activated to guide the first responders and to provide information on the deployment. TRIAGE will set up demonstrations in a large scale situation to prove its efficiency in a real deployment scenario. Several public events are scheduled as important standardisation participation in order to disseminate the results for a broader impact.