Today’s First Responders (FR) are using technology of the past. During their primary mission of saving lives and preserving society’s safety and security, FRs face a multitude of challenges. In both small scale emergencies and large scale disasters, they often deal with life-threatening situations, hazardous environments, uncharted surroundings and limited awareness. Threats and hazards evolve rapidly, crossing municipalities, regions and nations with speed and ease. Armouring public safety services with all the tools that modern technology has to offer is critical. Such tools holistically enhance their protection and augment their operational capacities, assisting them in saving lives as well as ensuring their safe return from the disaster scene.

Crisis incidents result in difficult working conditions for Urban Search-and-Rescue (USaR) crews. INACHUS aims to achieve a significant time reduction and increase efficiency in USaR operations.

IMPRESS aims to improve the efficiency of decision making in emergency health operations, which will have a direct impact on the quality of services provided to citizens. It will provide a consolidated concept of operations, to effectively manage medical resources, prepare and coordinate response activities, supported by a Decision Support System. It aims to facilitate communication between Health Services (and Emergency Responders) at all levels of response and the crisis cycle with the necessary health care systems support, supervision and management of participating organizations. It will assist health services in becoming more proactive, better prepared and interoperable with other emergency response organizations.

IN-PREP will establish and demonstrate a next generation programme by enabling a reference implementation of coordination operations (Handbook of Transboundary Preparedness and Response Operations that synthesises the lessons learnt, recommendations, check-lists from past incidents) and a training platform (Mixed Reality Preparedness Platform a novel IT-based tool, which holistically integrates Information Systems (IS) and Situational Awareness (SA) modules over a decision support mechanism and the visualisation of assets and personnel) to the entirety of civil protection stakeholders (firefighting units, medical emergency services, police forces, civil protection units, control command centres, assessment experts).

The project will design and develop a system for improving response planning strategies and scenario building (TRL 7 or 8) and facilitating organizational coordination among many actors, integrating a wide range of support tools to be used operationally by a large variety of stakeholders (firefighting units, medical emergency services, police departments, civil protection units, command and control centres). The devised system shall integrate existing and newly developed tools to enhance the cooperation between autonomous systems (satellite-, sea-, land- and air-based) from different agencies as well as to consolidate the methodology for cross-border scenario-building.

FORTRESS will seek to intervene in current crisis response practices by bridging the gap between the over-reliance on unstructured information collection on one side and a lack of attention to structural, communication and management elements of cross-border and cascading crisis situations on the other. It will use state of the art information collection and modelling tools to assist stakeholders in evaluating what information is significant, relevant and of greater priority so that they can adjust their actions accordingly.

SECTOR aims at establishing the foundations of future Common CCM Information Spaces by expanding the European scientific knowledge base on (cross-border) multi-agency CCM processes and the complications these imply when aiming at setting-up and design cross-border supporting information Systems.

PREDICT provides a comprehensive solution for dealing with cascading effects in multi-sectoral crisis situations covering aspects of critical infrastructures. The PREDICT solution will be composed of the following three pillars: methodologies, models and software tools.

The main objective of POP-ALERT is to prepare societies and populations to cope with crisis and disasters in a rapid, effective and efficient way by blending traditional Crisis Preparedness & First-Reaction strategies with the use of innovative contemporary tools.

EMERGE engineers a prototypical solution that treats emergencies with stepwise assistance. First, it provides early proactive assistance to the elderly himself. Next, it integrates friends, family, or caregivers. In case of an emergency that cannot be handled in the first two steps, an integrated emergency medical service (EMS) is called and informed about the case and the personal situation of the affected person. The integrated EMS can resolve the situation through medical care, telemedicine counselling, activation of social services, or sending a rescue team.