HEMS: a Hurricane Evacuation Management System

In the United States, there has been a high incidence of hurricanes over the past decade. Before a hurricane makes landfall it is important, for safety, that people who live in potentially dangerous areas, such as along the coast, evacuate. Nursing homes have an even greater concern during an evacuation as the patients are primarily elderly or disabled, and require additional assistance. In this paper we investigate the characteristics and challenges associated with hurricane evacuation of health care centers, such as nursing homes. Then, we propose a patient centric hurricane evacuation management system that allow healthcare providers to continuously monitor and track patients. The hardware and software architecture, and the main operations are presented. The proposed system is able to operate in difficult conditions, such as lack of basic communication services such as cellular and Internet. We evaluate the performance of the proposed system using the OPNET network simulator.