NIGHTINGALE’s Small-Scale Exercise (SSX) demonstrated and tested how the NIGHTINGALE innovative toolkit and its various components can help to achieve effective multi-agency emergency response in a realistic but controlled environment. The first prototype of the NIGHTINGALE toolkit was tested in two complex simulated MCI scenarios, with a particular focus on triage and pre-hospital care.
In addition to NIGHTINGALE partners, participants include volunteers with extensive experience in pre-hospital management from civil protection agencies, such as emergency medical services, fire brigades, and police, as well as civic volunteers. Moreover, several citizens were also involved, bringing their views and perspective into emergency response. They deployed, tested, and evaluated the developed tools during the exercise.
At the 18th October, NIGHTINGALE partners also conducted an informative demonstration session, presenting each component of the NIGHTINGALE toolkit, offering hands-on training in the practical use of these tools during triage and pre-hospital care.
The main exercise was conducted at the 19th October at the headquarters of the Italian Red Cross in Galliate. The volunteers deployed the prototype of the NIGHTINGALE toolkit in two distinct MCI scenarios:
- Scenario 1: During a country fair in the town of Galliate, there is an explosion of unknown origin that results in multiple victims
- Scenario 2: During a political rally, a car coming fast down the road spins out of controls and crashes onto the crowd.
SWAPP: SoftWare mobile APPlication for citizens
During the exercise, PARTICLE, jointly with ChapsVision and INOV, demonstrated the SoftWare mobile APPlication (SWAPP) that provided robust and rich mechanisms supporting citizens in case of emergencies.
In the SSX, coordinated by partner ACN, a group of 5 citizens were involved in the demonstration.
SWAPP two operation modes were demonstrated:
- 112 emergency call mode
SWAPP demonstrated the capability to make emergency calls to a next-generation PSAP (following the PEMEA standard ETSI TS 103 478), and to establish a communication with the PSAP operator using advanced multimedia functionalities: Chat (Instant messaging); Real-time text; Videocall (WebRTC audio video); File Exchange; Caller’s location and personal data pre-registered in the SWAPP App.
- Citizen to citizen mode
SWAPP demonstrated citizen-to-citizen (C2C) communication capabilities in online mode, including citizen registration (incl. name and avatar), interact with other citizens in audio, chat, and video calls (single and group), support sharing of information with other users (e.g., location, pictures, and files).
Moreover, SWAPP also demonstrated direct communications capabilities (i.e., “ad hoc” mode) allowing to find nearby citizens who have the SWAPP and consented to be known in the network (they either require help or want to provide help). In this mode, even in situations where communications infrastructures are not available, citizens can send messages to other (nearby) citizens, share profile information, and share their location.
Volunteer Management Portal
PARTICLE also developed a “Volunteer Management” Portal supporting a volunteer mode and a manager mode:
- The volunteer mode allows citizens to create an account, insert personal information and register their competences.
- The manager mode allows organisations to manage the registered volunteers.
ECHO: situational awareness tool for emergency management services
Another demonstrated tool was ECHO, that combines technologies from PARTICLE and INOV.
ECHO is a situational awareness tool for emergency management services designed to display a large volume of emergency-related information. It receives incident information from the NG PSAP, as well as from additional (non-conventional) sources like social media, to generate a comprehensive incident visualisation system.
For the SSX in Novara, the following was demonstrated:
Incidents Overview: ECHO receives incidents from the NG-PSAP module, keeping an historical registry of incident information. During the SSX, ECHO received incident information after being generated by the NG PSAP and displayed incidents information as: statistical data (totals over different time periods), geographical information system (GIS) overview (in clustered mode), incidents list (in tabular form) and incident details.
Social Media Overview: ECHO received social media information from the SMS module, which was generated from citizens’ posts during the SSX. ECHO displayed social media information as: list of relevant events, statistical information concerning categories of interest (e.g., injured or dead, trapped, found, other), wordcloud and list of posts (assigned to an event).
The feedback collected from participating citizens concerning the tools was very positive: citizens were able to reach emergency services (via the NG PSAP) in a rich and interactive way; communicate with each other and exchange videos, photos and location; and post messages to social media.
SWAPP and ECHO are being updated considering the collected feedback and will be demonstrated again in upcoming NIGHTINGALE’s field trials.
About NIGHTINGALE and the SSX
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