FASTER is a EU funded project that saw the collaboration among applied research institutions, enterprises and civil protection agencies. It proposed a new approach and new technological tools to manage emergencies. The objective was to improve the effectiveness of the response of rescue systems and to guarantee the safety conditions of the operators on site, through the use of state-of-the-art technologies, mostly mobile applications, autonomous drive vehicles, drones and blockchain.

In case of natural disasters, technological disasters caused by man or terrorist attacks, the rescue teams – Civil Protection volunteers, law enforcement agents, bomb techs, fire department agents, anti-terrorism units, and emergency health operators – all play a crucial role. Here are some examples of the solutions developed by the FASTER project that may be useful to support their difficult tasks:

• tools to create reports and geo-localise the rescue teams on the territory, developed in Telegram environment
• wearable tools such as smartwatches, to transmit and receive notifications
• textiles – sensors to be worn for telemetry monitoring environment and biometric parameters of the rescue teams
• interoperability and communication solutions between information systems, to exchange messages among operators
• cartography tools to visualise data relating to the emergency scenario, both in desktop and mobile version
• drones to fly over the areas, to transmit in real time the acquired images to the command centres and the civil protection operation rooms activated on the territory.

Piemonte is one of the three territories that saw the experimentation of the FASTER solution on the ground, starting with the first drill of 27th January 2021. On that occasion, a flooding event was simulated, replicating the flooding of the Chisola torrent that struck Moncalieri in 2016. The second Italian drill took place on 25th January 2022 in Avigliana, to test new technological tools to manage calamities. CSI was involved in all the project activities and is among the 23 project partners.