EVeRS Emergency Vehicle Request Service

Emergency management services are typically centralized and only accessible through call centers, where specialized operators handle emergencies according to their type and severity, and manually allocate the required resources (ambulances, firetrucks, police patrols, etc.). During these phone calls, people requesting emergency services sometimes cannot provide accurate information about their location (e.g., when they are not familiar with the area) or about the emergency itself (e.g., when they are in shock and cannot appropriately explain what is going on). This may lead to delays or to the allocation of insufficient or inadequate resources. However, vague indications are not the only source of potential delays. Actually, the traffic conditions and the routes selected by the emergency vehicles strongly determine how fast they arrive to their destination. Nevertheless, operators can only provide callers with a rough estimate about how long they will have to wait to be attended and, if this information is not appropriately updated, callers may become increasingly stressed. In this context, we introduce EVeRS, a framework aimed at helping all the actors involved in emergency service request and attendance. EVeRS will provide citizens with a mobile app allowing them to contact emergency call centers, providing their precise location (via the mobile GPS) and interacting with the operators in a multi-modal way (starting a voice call or a textual chat, sending images or videos, etc.). This app will also provide them with punctual information about how their emergency is being managed (services involved, position in a map, time to their location, etc.). EVeRS will also support emergency vehicles with a mobile app providing them with optimal routes (shortest distance, shortest time, lowest traffic density, etc.), and call center operators with a web application centralizing all the information provided both by citizens and emergency vehicles.