Electronic triage tag and opportunistic networks in disasters

The use of electronic devices such as sensors or smartphones in emergency scenarios has been increasing over the years with new systems taking advantage of their features: mobility, processing speed, network connection, etc. These devices and systems not only improve victim assistance (faster and more accurate) but also coordination. One of the problems is that most of these systems rely in the existence of a network infrastructures, but usually in big disasters, or mass casualties incidents, these infrastructures become saturated or destroyed by the very nature of the emergency. In this paper we present MAETT and Haggle-ETT, two applications that provide electronic triage tags (ETTs), a digital version of the classics triage tags, based on mobile agents and opportunistic networks, respectively. These systems are able to work even without network infrastructures using ad-hoc networks to forward the ETTs to a coordination point where they will be processed.