A low cost positioning and visualization system using smartphones for emergency ambulance service

Abstract

An ambulance is the type of emergency vehicle that, in order, to accomplish its mission of transporting patients in critical condition to hospitals, they must run as fast as they can through a city streets' maze. Hence, it is necessary a real-time system that could obtain anytime ambulance location. Moreover, it should advice on the best routes based on speed and time for achieve the target, given that the survival of the patients depends on the efficiency of this service. In a city like Sao Paulo in Brazil, for example, during the night, there may be hundreds or even thousands of ambulances running in the city, thus knowing the precise location of these vehicles is quite important. Despite these needs, the process of acquire and identifying the position of every ambulance can be costly if it is based on a GPS on every ambulance and a dedicated communication system. Therefore, we address these challenges in this paper with a low-cost solution based on the Android ® Smartphone platform. Thus, we developed:(1) a low-cost integrated GSM antenna probing module that perform continuous wireless "war-driving" and triangulation to estimate the ambulance position accurately, (2) another module to send encrypted messages through SMS service containing the position information to a central (3) a visualization module allowing real-time analysis of ambulances mobility on the city map.

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