FASTER: First Responder Advanced Technologies for Safe and Efficient Emergency Response

FASTER is an H2020 RIA project that develops a set of tools for enhancing the operational capacity of first responders while increasing their safety in the field. It will introduce augmented reality technologies for improved situational awareness and early risk identification and mobile and wearable technologies for better mission management and information delivery to first responders. Body- and gesture-based user interfaces will be employed to enable new capabilities while reducing equipment clutter, offering unprecedented ergonomics. Moreover, FASTER will provide a platform of autonomous vehicles aiming to collect valuable information from the disaster scene prior to operations, extend situational awareness and offer physical response capabilities to first responders. Furthermore, first responders will improve their situational awareness receiving information gathered and analysed by a Portable Common Operational Picture (PCOP). PCOP will gather multimodal data from the field, utilising an IoT network, and social media content to extract meaningful information and to orchestrate an intelligent response to the disaster. The whole system will be facilitated by tools for Resilient Communications Support featuring opportunistic relay services, emergency communication devices and 5G-enabled communication capabilities.