Service oriented pervasive computing for emergency response systems

Pervasive computing paradigm is characterized by the presence of a diverse variety of computing and communicating devices. The vision of pervasive computing is to enable effective support for user tasks by utilizing the devices carried by the users and those available within the infrastructure around the users. Emergency response is very critical to crisis situations. The process of emergency response can benefit greatly by the application of pervasive computing principles. In this paper, we describe a prototype designed to enhance the existing emergency response mechanism in attending to automobile accident victims. The prototype has been built using our event oriented middleware called pervasive information communities organization (PICO), and is built on top of a popular P2P framework called JXTA. By utilizing the middleware, we model the useful features of devices available within a car as services. Our proposed framework allows the creation, discovery and maintenance of continuous services such as crash detection. Further more, the framework allows the composition of complex services on occurrence of events by utilizing the available basic services with a goal to provide essential support in case of an accident. We present the design and implementation details of the prototype and snapshots of the working prototype