Major emergencies have increased in complexities and scale. They have become more severe in magnitude and societal repercussions. They cross borders and affect the livelihoods of local and global communities. To increase resilience and disaster protection in the European Union, it is imperative to use the most advanced technology and up-to-date civil protection systems.

The Novel InteGrated toolkit for enhanced pre-Hospital life support and Triage IN challenGing And Large Emergencies (NIGHTINGALE) project aims to optimise current procedures and methods and to enhance the operational capacities of emergency medical services and civil protection agencies in mass casualty incidents.

NIGHTINGALE will offer intelligent, integrated, and interconnected tools and services. These technological solutions will be complemented with a commonly agreed operational framework that will be embedded seamlessly within the workflow.

The project will enhance pre-hospital life support and triage procedures in two distinct ways. One, by integrating training and validation approaches involving first responders in real-life scenarios. Two, by developing tools for challenging and complex environments.

Project website: https://www.nightingale-triage.eu/


PARTICLE’s Role

PARTICLE brings its expertise in technologies for emergency response and mobile technologies to develop solutions in the following areas:

  • Emergency Mobile Applications for Citizens, supporting two operation modes:
    • Online mode (connected to available telecommunications infrastructure), delivering digital-based communications and data exchange capabilities to citizens in emergencies: digital, IP-based, multimedia (video, audio, text). When making an emergency call and upon user consent, it sends personal information – such as allergies, medical conditions, accurate location data and devices’ data (e.g., from smartwatch or wearable sensors, where relevant).
    • Offline mode (not connected to any telecommunications infrastructure) where smartphones builds an ad-hoc network (peer-to-peer mesh network using Wi-Fi or Bluetooth) with other nearby smartphones. Using this “direct mode” secure network the connected group of people (“volunteers”) will be supported by a set of local services, that will help them work together to use their collective knowledge and skills set to self-organize and help victims that are nearby.
    • This work is supported by NIGHTINGALE partners Deveryware and INOV. The App uses the Standard PEMEA (standard ETSI TS 103 478).
  • Situational Awareness Tools supporting next generation emergency services. It presents to decision makers and emergency coordinators:
    • Intuitive and comprehensive incident/crime management system: Georeferenced events, Incident information (type, severity, status, location and time), Multimedia data (photos, videos and text).
    • All reported incidents present a trustworthiness factor (verified vs. non-verified) to determine the degree of trust on the information source
    • Capable to handle and display a high stream of emergency incidents

For more information about the products that form the basis for PARTICLE work in NIGHTINGALE see the following article:

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement No. 101021957