Context Introduction¶
Emergency response is a challenging situation that contains a lot of problems arising in a matter of hours after the disaster.Few of those challenges are:
- Situation assessment, evaluate current disaster scope and identify the most urging matters.
- search and rescue (plus medical care following this rescue)
- Emergency sheltering
- Food and water supplies
- Operation coordination
All of those problems must be solved using changing and partial information, rapidly changing priorities and stressed peoples.
In a nutshell, every emergency situation is unique, random and complex. The solution to this is standardisation of operation management.
Coordinating those operations needs reliable communication means. Hopelessly, usual communication means are very often everything but reliable in the hours following the disaster.
For instance, local phone network cells may be offline or saturated.
The response to the possible unavailability of all those communication means is flexibility. It is desirable to be able to set up an outpost in most situations,
if not internet connexion is available, the outpost should be able to function in degraded mode. If internet is available, we should make use of it regardless of its nature (either
a satellite access, a wifi hotspot or a wired connection.)
In order to get a good system, we might want to meet the following requirements (non-exhaustive list):
- Ease of use, even in difficult context (gloves, only one hand, low light, little space, etc.)
- Scalable
- quick deployment
- Form factor consistent with equipment capabilities
- Rugged design (IP68-like stresses like water, dust, shocks, etc.)
- Reliable
- Remains operational if no connexion to the information backbone
- low price
- Flexible yet standard power supply options
- Versatile
- Secure ( confidentiality of the information backbone must not be put at risk)
To answer this is quite a quite a challenge, because some of those requirements are more or less contradictory (security VS quick deployment, versatility VS reliability, etc.)
Our answer will take the form of an ECCS: Emergency Communication Cell by Satellite. It will be a device (here a rugged suitcase) that can deploy a small area of telecommunication services.
This box can be connected to the internet (either satellite or landline, provided we have the usual RJ45/MAC/IP compatibility) or operate completely on its own, running operation specific software to serve the operational needs.
It is a device taking part in the *box family, composed of Maxibox and Minibox. As we are making it even smaller than minibox, we call it microbox.