Mobile Health Personal-to-Wide Area Network Disaster Management Paradigm

As full-scale natural disasters unfold, telecommunication infrastructures and services are among the most impacted, halting the necessary communications to and from the disaster zones, including the humanitarian operators and the people in need. The temporary relief can be achieved by establishing infrastructureless (ad-hoc) wireless networks; however, ad hoc networks, instead of providing direct services to the end-users and affected people, provide direct connectivity to the localized service providers, which indirectly cover end-users. From a range of services provided by the humanitarian operators, healthcare has by far the top priority, which is the focus of this paper, through the utilization of smartphones in a Mobile Health (mHealth) perspective, which is an emerging concept in the smart-city paradigm for monitoring and tracking end-user health conditions. This paper covers the disaster management paradigm based on a novel bidirectional mHealth disaster recovery system and its protocol design and associated implications.