The development and adoption of new technologies like the Internet of Things (IoT) are becoming essential to enhance preparedness and response in disaster management. This article deliberates on the role of IoT in disaster management and new developments in this field.
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Importance of IoT
Disasters or adverse events are caused by intentional human actions, accidents, climate factors, or other natural calamitous events, affecting a group of individuals, the environment, the local community, and countries in terms of economy and public health. Disaster management involves a set of structured processes that incorporate the operations of management, action application, and planning at any stage of the disaster, including rescue, response, recovery, and mitigation.
The key objective of disaster management is the integration of interrelated processes that offer more efficient methods to predict, analyze, manage, and monitor disasters. Sets of actions are applicable to accidents or natural disasters to minimize impacts through emergency assistance, reconstruct affected locations, search for missing victims, and supply food and diverse materials.
These actions require specialized support from public policies and professionals, along with material donations and government financial subsidies. Technology plays a key role in disaster management by performing specific roles and assisting professionals.
The growth of new technologies like IoT has altered the form of disaster management as the capacities and tools of human beings vary based on the existing technology. Specifically, several plans have been proposed and implemented for controlling post-disaster conditions, predicting situations, and making preparations with the emergence of IoT.
Advantages and Challenges of IoT
IoT optimizes resource allocation and accelerates all steps of the disaster management process. Using IoT technology, disaster management operations can be visualized more precisely, more accessible and faster information resources can be created, all emergency management processes can be simplified and optimized, and infrastructures required for involving all stakeholders in disaster management can be developed.
IoT plays a significant role in rescue operations, victim aid, environment monitoring, and disaster prediction. The efficiency of the entire management increases as impact data are collected from diverse sources, including from reliable and strategic locations. IoT provides support for big data analysis, data collection, information sharing, data monitoring, and mutual collaboration between professionals involved in disaster management.
Thus, IoT maximizes communication with simultaneous data exchanges from real environments. Real-time data support is provided by IoT technologies to professionals/experts who make decisions during, before, or in response to disaster recovery. IoT technologies also benefit experts with technological assistance and help expand disaster-related knowledge based on the disaster's characteristics and impacts generated.
The interconnection of devices and other objects to the network composed of computers, satellites, mobile devices, and sensors, can facilitate risk identification and assessment, mapping of affected locations and areas, adoption of preventive measures, and actions constantly requiring information owing to the need for resource allocation, ensuring enhanced response and preparedness.
Despite these advantages, the use of IoT technologies for disaster management also presents many challenges, including identification issues, security and privacy, propagation of inaccurate information, and delay in responding due to the high scale of networks.
For instance, inaccurate information propagation during a disaster can be intensified by the IoT-created broad communication networks. This can happen due to damage and defects in network infrastructures, errors of measurement tools like the physical nodes of the perception layer, or environmental noises.
In such cases, the verification of the information will be more challenging. Similarly, security is another significant challenge, specifically in out-of-control and critical situations. In the entire disaster management cycle, security issues are caused by the inherent features of IoT technology, including heterogeneity, scalability, and mobility.
For instance, the nodes' mobility feature makes the authentication issue more serious, while securing the communication of objects becomes challenging due to the heterogeneity of objects. All security threats are considered as a part or combination of its four main types, including attacks on privacy attempts, attacks on the network, device attacks, and data attacks.
Major IoT Applications
Knowledge about the Disaster: IoT detects natural phenomena such as temperature, wind, and precipitation in a distributed manner by combining heterogeneous data; ensures more consistent decision-making in disaster anticipation or action planning; and minimizes and prevents disaster risks by monitoring potential disasters through early alert systems and satellite communication, and spreading awareness using social media. Early knowledge about disasters assists in enhancing preparedness levels.
Direct Assistance to Victims: IoT-based solutions can monitor patient parameters like breathing activity, blood pressure, and body temperature; and optimize the physical infrastructure of a city, such as shelters, hospitals, and vehicles, during emergencies.
These solutions also ensure real-time communication for timely assistance and measures, and ease the recovery process, such as online search for missing people, during disasters. However, reliable and effective interoperability from all systems, including personal traceable devices of victims, is crucial for the effective functioning of IoT-based solutions in disaster management.
Supplies Management: IoT plays an important role in stock management and product distribution, tracking, and deliveries. It facilitates the development of smart transportation systems and tracking vehicles to supply food and water, clothing, and medicines during disaster response.
IoT Technologies and Components
General Disasters: Wireless sensor networks (WSNs), internet control protocol (TCP/IP), open systems interconnection models (OSI), radio-frequency identification sensors (RFID), infrared and ground sensors, global positioning systems (GPS), device-free passive localization (DfPL), set of IoT-enabled medical sensors, mobile devices, ESP8266 data module, and Linux server are used for prevention, planning/action planning, assessment, and recovery.
Natural Disasters in General and Geological Disasters: Medical equipment with wireless communication, sensors, gateway systems, and cloud computing are utilized for recovery during natural disasters. During geological disasters, general packet radio service (GPRS) communication technologies and μC/OS-II embedded operating systems are used for the prevention of greater damage.
Floods: Ultrasonic and infrared sensors, ESP-8266 microcontroller, mobile devices, specific software, internet services, urban area cameras, rain gauges, GPS-enabled tracking sensors, weather surveillance radars, and lightning detection sensors are utilized for prevention and planning.
Earthquakes: Emergency wireless communication networks like wideband code division multiple access (WCDMA) and Zigbee, sensors, mobile devices, and wireless internet networks play a critical role in recovery and prevention.
Building and Environmental Fires: WSNs, sensors, fog computing, and the open Microsoft technology center platform are utilized for control of environmental fires, rapid rescue of building dwellers, information support to the emergency team, and post-disaster victim rescue.
Accidents in Mines: Sensors are used to obtain geographic information about the coal mine surface and underground geological information, and monitor the mine's production system in real-time for disaster early-warning and prediction. The collected data volumes are processed using big data.
Radiation: Disaster monitoring and coordination of emergency responses are performed using intelligent sensors, WSNs, actuators, internet servers, and mobile devices.
New Developments
A paper published in the 2020 International Conference on Advanced Robotics and Intelligent Systems proposed an architecture of artificial intelligence (AI) and IoT in robotic disaster response. Through AI algorithms and IoT, different unmanned vehicles possessed autonomous behavior, and then further became mobile robots.
Four robot cooperation architectures based on AI and IoT were introduced for search and rescue in disaster response. The surface, aerial, underwater, and ground robots individually collected "sensory data" from each environment and passed it to on-site workstations for further cloud computing/training and validation.
Subsequently, trained AI models were deployed back to the on-site workstation through the cloud for testing and to the robots' embedded systems for continuous learning. Results showed more effective cooperation among robots compared to a single robot. Additionally, the decision-making using AI was more consistent with the disaster response environment.
In conclusion, while IoT offers significant advantages in disaster management, challenges like security and information accuracy remain. The future holds promise with advancements like AI-powered robots for search and rescue, further enhancing our ability to respond to disasters and save lives.
References and Further Reading
Lee, M. F. R., Chien, T. W. (2020). Artificial intelligence and Internet of Things for robotic disaster response. 2020 International Conference on Advanced Robotics and Intelligent Systems (ARIS), 1-6. DOI: 10.1109/ARIS50834.2020.9205794, https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9205794
Bail, R. D. F., Kovaleski, J. L., da Silva, V. L., Pagani, R. N., Chiroli, D. M. D. G. (2021). Internet of things in disaster management: Technologies and uses. Environmental Hazards, 20(5), 493-513. DOI: 10.1080/17477891.2020.1867493, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17477891.2020.1867493
Ghasemi, P., Karimian, N. (2020). A qualitative study of various aspects of the application of IoT in disaster management. 2020 6th International Conference on Web Research (ICWR), 77-83. DOI: 10.1109/ICWR49608.2020.9122323, https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9122323