Akihiro Shibayama

Three-Way Pinpointing of Emergency Call from RFID-Reader-Equipped Cellular Phone

The ability to accurately pinpoint the point of origin of an emergency call can greatly increase response times of emergency services. Emergency calls made from cellular phones can only be traced by the Global Positioning System (GPS) or cell-based positioning, which are sometimes unacceptably inaccurate; they cannot provide information on, e.g. the exact floor of a building and also suffer from blind spots. We have been developing a system that can determine the location of a cellular phone using in-built passive or active radio-frequency identification (RFID) readers and GPS receivers. This paper introduces the outline of the prototype system.

Pinpointing the Place of Origin of a Cellular Phone Emergency Call Using Active RFID Tags

When police, fire or ambulance personnel receive an emergency call, they must pinpoint its place of origin in order to respond quickly. When such a call is made from a cellular phone, its place of origin can be determined by using GPS or a cell-based positioning method. However, these methods are sometimes inaccurate and have blind spots. We developed a system for determining location using RFID-reader- equipped cellular phones and RFID tags. We outline the prototype system here.

ESTIMATION FOR EVALUATING EMERGENCY RESPONSE ABILITY BY VOLUNTARY DISASTER PREVENTION ORGANIZATIONS IN NEIGHBORHOOD AGAINST EARTHQUAKE DISASTER IN CITY OF SENDAI

Voluntary disaster prevention organizations in neighborhood should prepare the emergency response ability in regions exposed to especially higher earthquake disaster risk. Against the expected Off Miyagi earthquake with Mw=8.0, an evaluation method for emergency response ability is applied to all of the 1,391 organizations in City of Sendai. Even if some regions exposed to especially higher risk, most of their preparedness levels of emergency response were uniformly low. Strategy for disaster prevention promotion considering the risk differences is needed.