Social Media and the Internet of Things for Emergency and Disaster Medicine Management

Abstract

Social Media and the Internet of Things are nowadays full and strong components of day-to-day life worldwide. Both allow communicating with others 24 hours a day, 7 days a week without distance limitations. During the last decade, on-site citizens have shared disaster-related first reports on social media. Official institutions are using the same framework for delivering up-to-date and follow-up directives. Moreover, monitoring health risks, patients, and systems behavior in real-time over the Internet-of-Things allows detecting different levels of anomalies that might lead to critical events that need to be managed as an emergency. Emergency and disaster medicines deal with broad and complex medical, surgical, mental health, epidemiological, managerial, and communicational issues. Social Media platforms and the Internet of Things are technologies that increase cyber-physical interactions between individuals, machines, and their environment. The generated data over time are massive and are supporting the emergency or disaster mitigation process. This chapter deals with, in the first section, the social media platforms, and the Internet of Things. Then, at a second one, the concepts of emergency, disaster medicine and management are discussed. In the following two sections, we discuss applications and usages of social media and IoT technologies for improving the management (preparedness, response, recovery, mitigation) of emergencies and disasters as fundamental keys and pillars for efficiently handling the managerial information flow in emergency and disaster contexts.