Intelligent Dashboard for Augmented Reality based Incident Command Response Co-ordination Mark Vassell, Olivia Apperson, Prasad Calyam, John Gillis, Salman Ahmad University of Missouri-Columbia, USA {mdvy96, oamr6}@mail.missouri.edu; {calyamp, gillisj}@missouri.edu; {ahmadsa}@health.missouri.edu Abstract—Communication in a mass casualty disaster scene is limited and difficult for medical personnel in the absence of necessary communication infrastructure and collaboration technologies. It leads to misdirected and delayed triage of scene- wide critically injured patients, especially when there is a large volume of patients needing diverse care levels. In this paper, we describe a novel Intelligent Dashboard that provides augmented reality benefits with minimal human communication through integration of a standardized Incident Command System (ICS) with Internet of Things (IoT) such as heads-up displays, virtual beacons, QR-code cards, and wireless mesh network elements. We conduct a usability evaluation with a two-incident ‘Task Force 1 Rescue’ simulation to show the ease-of-use and effectiveness of our Intelligent Dashboard. Our work lays the foundation for next- generation ICS for an Incident Commander to deploy resources at the right locations more efficiently, and reduce triage time, mitigate over/under triage, and thus increase triage care levels. I. I NTRODUCTION Communication in a mass casualty disaster scene is limited and difficult in the absence of necessary communication infras- tructure and collaboration technologies. It leads to misdirected over-triage/under-triage and even delayed triage of scene-wide critically injured patients, especially when there is a large volume of patients needing diverse care levels. Such a situation can be expensive for hospitals who have limited medical staff and supplies, as well as can potentially lead to loss of lives. Today, there is lack of integrated technology platforms that allow a Medical Director or Incident Commander(s) to collaboratively sense disaster scene status events. Suitable technologies for efficient co-ordination can help them to strate- gically delegate triage responsibility to first responders and direct them remotely using audiovisual communication. They can also help with emergency response in disaster scenarios that requires all first responder groups such as Fire, Police, EMS, and health services to co-ordinate closely rather than act as isolated units [1]. Further, Incident Commanders could be equipped to use mobile cloud technologies and wired/wire- less network diversity to connect to external databases (e.g., blood bank, patient data, medical resource pools that update availability of beds, ambulances, expert opinion, and so on) to have adequate situational awareness for effective disaster relief response. Wearable technologies can provide hands- free communication capability to doctors/nurses and other responders and can improve collaboration. This work was supported by the Wallace H. Coulter Foundation, and the National Science Foundation under Award No. CNS-1359125. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Wallace H. Coulter Foundation or the National Science Foundation. The state-of-the-art practice in hospitals to handle mass casualty disaster triage is to use a standing protocol such as “Code Silver” [2]. This protocol is based on a hierarchal Inci- dent Command System (ICS), whose technology is provided by companies such as Intermedix [3]. Existing ICS deploy- ments rely on an operational infrastructure as the communi- cation backbone to coordinate efforts between ICS divisions. They prominently feature text-based web-applications for inci- dent response status notifications, and offers basic synchronous text messaging as a way for synchronous communications between the Incident Commander and First Responders. In addition, they assume outdated communication modes in mass casualty disaster triage that involves the use of traditional radio handsets between responder personnel in absence of communication infrastructure. Moreover, they do not take advantage of wearable tech- nologies such as Google Glass [4] and Recon Jet [5] heads-up displays that allow for hands-free communication and force multiplication, enabling a single individual to perform more tasks that earlier needed more individuals to perform. This is essential when caring to needs of critical patients and co-ordinating with other support medical staff. Coupling the ICS web-applications with the use of wearable technologies along with other Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices (e.g., virtual beacons, wireless mesh network elements) and a mobile cloud platform as shown in Figure 1 can provide the benefits of augmented reality. This in turn can transform the ICS workflows by notably improving the situational awareness for effective co-ordination between involved staff in a disaster relief situation. In this paper, we describe a novel Intelligent Dashboard that provides augmented reality benefits with minimal human com- munication through integration of a standardized ICS with IoT devices such as heads-up displays [4] [5], virtual beacons [6], QR-code cards [7], and wireless mesh network elements. This work builds upon our earlier work on developing a “Panacea’s Glass” framework that features an architecture for a basic heads-up display integration featuring Google Glasses within a wireless mesh network environment [8]. More specifically, in this paper, we detail our development of a ‘Responder Theater Dashboard’ (also referred to as the Intelligent Dashboard in the remainder of this paper) for our “Panacea mobile cloud” 1 that demonstrates how to integrate IoT devices with the 1 Panacea in English means a solution or remedy for all difficulties or diseases, and references the Greek goddess of universal remedy viz., Panacea. Our effort could be equated to a mobile cloud service with wearable tech- nologies and other IoT devices that provide tools for Panacea when treating many patients simultaneously in austere environments.