Disaster response: Victims' localization using Bluetooth Low Energy sensors

Disasters caused by terrorist attacks or by natural causes such as floodings or earthquakes pose a very challenging task for emergency responders. DIORAMA disaster situation awareness and management system enhances the situation awareness of emergency responders by localizing victims in real time. In this paper we introduce a low cost localization algorithm for DIORAMA system using Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology. The BLE based localization algorithm improves the localization accuracy of stationary victims as well as re-localizes moving victims opportunistically. Our localization algorithm introduces a Kurtosis-based confidence metric which is used to improve the location estimation and a Maximum Likelihood (ML)-based detector used to detect victims' movements. Our experiments show that the proposed localization algorithm can detect the movement of the victims with a false positive rate as low as 1.2% and can localize victims within an average accuracy of 11ft.