Abstract—DIORAMA is a real-time scalable decision support framework built on rapid information collection and accurate resource tracking functionalities. Using RFID technology the proposed system tracks emergency responders and victims at the disaster scene. DIORAMA improves the accuracy and decreases the time it takes rescuers to triage, treat and evacuate victims from a disaster scene, as compared to the traditional methods and process that involves using paper triage tags. The information can then be viewed from a website that shows a satellite image of the disaster area with icons representing the paramedics and victims. Index Terms—Outdoor localization, active RFID, triage, disaster, mass casualty incident. I. INTRODUCTION Disasters are by definition unpredictable, dangerous and overwhelming. Our project, DIORAMA, is designed to assist incident commanders in their attempt to bring order to the chaos as they direct rescue operations. This technology can also be used to keep track of personnel; particularly should there be secondary events that put the rescuers at risk. Once the first responders arrive at the mass casualty incident site, they deploy the DIORAMA equipment. The Emergency Medical Service (EMS) providers will triage each patient in the disaster scene and tag them with a DIORAMA electronic tag (D-tag) which reflects the severity of the patient’s injury (red, yellow, green and black) and will be used to track the patients’ location. Moreover, each emergency responder (paramedic, firefighter, police personnel, etc) and resource also carries a DIORAMA tag. Using our DIORAMA system, we will have an accurate knowledge of the real-time location of each of the patients as well as of the emergency responders and resources (see Figure 1). Some specific scenarios to demonstrate the This project was supported in part by the following grants: Grant numbers ANI-0434985 and DUE-0736888 from the National Science Foundation and Grant Numbers R21LM008942-01A2 and 3R21LM008942-02S2 (ARRA) from the National Library of Medicine/National Institutes of Health. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Science Foundation, National Library of Medicine or the National Institutes of Health. benefits of this technology: On January 12, 2010 a catastrophic earth quake struck the island nation of Haiti. This disaster is ongoing, but what is known is that over 3 million people are affected and the death toll will likely exceed 150,000. The injured and dead are dispersed over approximately 700 hundred square miles. Many of the dead have been removed from their collapsed buildings and buried making identification and location issues nearly impossible. If initial response teams had the DIORAMA system the triage system would not only determine who needs what resources and where they are, but they would also insure that the deceased patients would be tracked. In large disasters, such as what is currently ongoing in Haiti, patients are frequently identified by their location. With DIORAMA the system would have captured the deceased initial location at tagging which could allow the victim to be identified. In the Wenchuan earth quake in Sichuan Province, China in 2008, there were 16,000 missing victims. Many were buried in mass graves or carried away in the rubble when it was removed. DIORAMA could allow the identification of many of those victims through its location technology. Disaster response and recovery efforts require timely interaction and coordination of emergency services in order to save lives and property. WIISARD[1], CodeBlue[2], and AID-N[3] are among the recent efforts to develop new technologies for disaster management. While these systems provide a large amount of useful operational and clinical data to rescuers, the expense, size and complexity of the client device they use make it impractical to distribute an adequate number of devices to all of the victims on the disaster scene. The remainder of the paper includes the following sections. Section II introduces DIORAMA architecture and Section III introduces DIORAMA software overview. The localization engine is described in Section IV. Section V summarizes testing results and Section VI concludes the paper. II. DIORAMA ARCHITECTURE The DIORAMA architecture overview is presented in Figure 2. Each victim is tagged with an active RFID tag which we denote D-tag which is worn by the End Users *Electrical and Computer Engineering Department University of Massachusetts, 01003 **Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center Harvard Medical School ***MS, NREMT-P, Associate Director, Office of Homeland Security The George Washington University DIORAMA: Dynamic Information Collection and Resource Tracking Architecture Aura Ganz*, Fellow, IEEE, Xunyi Yu*, James Schafer*, Sophie D’Hauwe*, Larry A. Nathanson**, Jonathan Burstein**, Gregory R. Ciottone**, Graydon Lord***, 32nd Annual International Conference of the IEEE EMBS Buenos Aires, Argentina, August 31 - September 4, 2010 386 U.S. Government work not protected by U.S. copyright