VALKYRIES – Harmonizing Response and Procedures for Emergencies and First-Aid Vehicles deployment

The increasing frequency and intensity of natural disasters require policies aimed at tackling these risks through preventive, preparedness, response and recovery actions. Increasing the resilience of infrastructure, ecosystems and society in the EU is an important strand of disaster risk management work.

It is from this need that VALKYRIES was born, a project financed by the European Union (EU) under the framework of the H2020 program. It is within the field of security, specifically in disaster-resilient societies under the topic Pre-normative research and demonstration for disaster-resilient societies: First aids vehicles deployment, training, maintenance, logistic and remote centralized coordination means.

The project will develop a methodology for tracking and analysing the needs for standardisation and certification harmonisation as regards the tools for supporting EU disaster resiliency. Specifically, it will develop, integrate and demonstrate capabilities for enabling immediate and coordinated emergency response, including for search and rescue, security and health, in scenarios of natural/provoked catastrophes with multiple victims, with special application in cases in several regions or countries.

Project website: https://www.valkyries-h2020.eu

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PARTICLE’s Role

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

• Situational Awareness Tools allowing teams and individuals to visualise and understand tactical scenarios, based on collected and shared intelligence among its members (e.g., team geolocation, points-of-interest, geo-tagged multimedia). The Situational Awareness Tools support configurations such as C2 headquarters (web-based tools for decision makers and team leaders generating maps, statistics, charts, briefings, reports, alerts) and mobile scenarios (running in consumer tablets and smartphones with hardened security measures). 
• Emergency resources coordination and tracking: providing to emergency response coordination with a view of existing incidents and available resources (e.g., ambulances, first-aid vehicles, staff). The tool allows tracking of assignments and following update of the response: location of vehicles, information about victims (including EHR and vitals, if available) and estimated time-of-arrival (ETA).
• Remote Patient Monitoring tools, linking emergency response to the receiving hospital. The system displays to the hospital the number of victims on arrival, including their status (with EHR and vitals information, if available), location and estimated time-of-arrival (ETA).

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

Next Generation Emergency Response Services