Emergency response in smartphone-based Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

Today's modern mobile devices (e.g., smartphones and tablets) present great potential for building large-scale mobile sensing and information sharing systems which can be highly beneficial to minimize the fatalities of human lives during emergency response. This paper presents a framework, called BREathing rate MONitoring (BREMON) that allows paramedics to monitor the breathing activities of multiple patients at once using their smartphones. BREMON uses the smartphone accelerometer to measure the accelerations during the breathing activities of a patient. These raw acceleration data are then processed to calculate the number of Breaths Per Minute (BPM) and periodically sent to the smartphones used by the paramedics over a multi-hop network. BREMON makes use of an underlying service sharing infrastructure, called SPontaneous Information and Resource sharing InfrasTructure (SPIRIT) that allows mobile devices to share the breathing activity data as services within the infrastructure.