USF To Participate in Super Bowl "ShadowBowl" with Rescue Robots and Remote Operations

The Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue (CRASAR) at the University of South Florida will pre-deploy rescue robots at the Super Bowl as part of their participation in the ShadowBowl, a community readiness drill taking place in parallel with the Super Bowl. In addition, CRASAR and the Center for Disaster Management and Humanitarian Assistance (CDMHA) will host a mini-operations center to serve as a remote reach back telemedicine resource on the ShadowBowl distributed network, helping to evaluate the ability to distribute and coordinate national medical resources during a mass casualty event.

The purpose of the ShadowBowl exercise is to test biomedical technologies and communication systems that could be used in a mass casualty event. This is expected to provide extremely valuable feedback for decision makers, first responders, and hospital based providers to learn from new tools and technologies that not only will be useful in the event of a mass casualty but may also create more efficient process flow, patient safety and cost effectiveness in day to day healthcare settings. ShadowBowl is sponsored in part by the government and the City of San Diego. Collaborating partners in the Shadow Bowl include the FBI, National Guard, San Diego City Police Department, County of San Diego Emergency Medical Services, San Diego County Hazardous Materials Division, Denver Health Telemedicine, Department of Justice, San Diego County Sheriffs Department, Mindtel, Ideations, MedWeb, San Diego Police Department, Metro Med Strike Team Unit (MMST), East Carolina University, San Diego Supercomputer Center, San Diego State University, Cal-(IT)2, Office of Secretary of Defense, and Adroit Systems.

USF was asked to participate in ShadowBowl, both in San Diego and remotely, due to the successful deployment of the rescue robots at the WTC disaster, continuing work in adding medical payloads to the robots, and ongoing work in disaster management. Besides being on-site should the drill become an actual event, CRASAR expects to use the ShadowBowl to test reach-back capabilities for the robots that would allow experts all over the world to access the rescue robot data. Such capabilities could allow the experts to determine the best medical care to give a victim trapped in the deep rubble or evaluate the collapsed structure and recommend the most efficient way to extricate the victim.

"We're sending a one-person team to San Diego this week. We'll probably see more of the Bucs from the TV in our operations center here at USF than they will," comments Prof. Murphy, director of CRASAR. "But this gives us a chance to experiment with incorporating the data from the robots into a distributed medical network. And, should some terrorist event happen, we'll have some robots right there, ready to help."

Media will be able to observe the USF node of the ShadowBowl distributed network immediately before and during the Super Bowl in the CRASAR Shadow Bowl command center on the USF Tampa campus. Displays of the internet connection will be available as well as demonstrations of the duplicates of the rescue robots pre-deployed in San Diego. Prof. Robin Murphy, director of CRASAR, and CDR Eric Rasmussen, MD FACP, the director for Bioinformatics will be available for interviews.

CRASAR is the international leader in research and development of rescue robots, and maintains a fully-trained response team, including equipment, emergency vehicles, and a 28 foot C-130 deployable trailer, on 4-hour readiness. CRASAR is located at the University of South Florida in Tampa. Prof. Robin Murphy is the director. CRASAR is sponsored by the National Science Foundation, DARPA, the Office of Naval Research, and SAIC, Inc as well as CDMHA. Additional information is available at www.crasar.org. CDMHA at USF provides education, training and research in the areas of disaster management and humanitarian assistance with a focus on Latin America and the Caribbean. More information about CDMHA is at www.cdmha.org.

Contacts:

USF: Alicia Slater-Haase at 813-974-9896 to arrange interviews and tours on Sunday.
Shadow Bowl in San Diego: Dr. David Warner

For more Information:

Center for Disaster Management and Humanitarian Assistance [CDMHA]
Shadow Bowl 2003 - A community readiness drill