Project Announcements

Imagine a CBRN crisis and blue light responders in the middle of the chaos deploying sensors, drones and using hand-held detectors to get meaningful CBRN information to enable situation awareness. Imagine these responders’ teams tagging casualties and tracking them and their medical treatments. Imagine a command and control room where all this information is retrieved and centralized for the crisis commander, enabling informed decision making, facilitating an effective response and accelerating the recovery. That all happened at TOXI-triage FOCUS exercise in Athens last October.

We are happy to announce that Ms. Dahlia Salman won the Poster Prize 2018 for ‘TOXI-Triage: breath analysis as a component in mass casualty triage’ awarded at the IABR Breath Summit 2018.

The International Association of Breath Research (IABR), organizes international conferences with the goal of providing an opportunity for researchers to meet and discuss important topics associated with breath chemical analysis, sensor instrumentation and biomarker detection and identification strategies.

With just 18 months to project completion, the Expert Evaluation Panel (EEP) Meeting in April in Moreton in Marsh will critically evaluate plans for the FTX and ensure that we are on track for the final push to successful completion.

The panel of experts will be composed by CBRN End User experts from Police, Fire, Ambulance, Military and Hospitals.
The purpose of their review is to assess and ensure that the planned FTXs will enable suitable evaluation of the project technologies.

As part of the preparartions for the FTX FOCUS, HMOD conducted a rehearsal of the exercise in Athens from the 20th to the 23rd of February.
The purpose of the rehearsal was to facilitate the smooth transition from the planning to the execution phase of the field exercise.

What is the triage process and how does it change in the case of a CBRN event? How to behave in the hot zone? What is needed to get a full operational picture as a first responder ambulance crew or firefighter in full protective gear? How can this be enhanced by TOXI-triage technology? These are some of the issues which will be addressed.

A TOXI-triage operational specifications workshop took place in HMOD premises in Athens on the 3rd of July.

The workshop was attended by many practicionners from Greek military and civil protection organisations. The objectives of the workshop were:

The workshop/master class will be based on expert practitioner presentations, supported by table-top discussions with facilitated and structured analysis and feedback. Throughout there will be opportunities for all participants to contribute with plenary and feedback sessions. This event is intended to enable practitioners to benchmark and align their expertise and experience and provide informed feedback and direction to researchers and developers of next-generation technologies for CBRN crises management and response.

The five lectures and table-top exercise that comprised the workshop and master class are summarised along with embedded presentations and links to web resources. Two areas for collaboration were identified and these were the adoption of a common set of aqueous standards and the development of a common approach to proficiency testing and benchmarking.

The TOXI-Triage End User Survey workshop was held in Brussels on 1 March 2016. One of the important aspects of the TOXI-Triage project is to involve end users right from the initial planning stages of field exercises (FTX). This Workshop was scheduled to gain early input from the Community of Users, the highest level of organization of security stakeholders for European security projects.

After six months the governance of this project has been established and the planning and activities associated with the nine-work packages of the project are underway. This introductory briefing for TOXI-triage’s project advisory board and ethics advisory board has been arranged to:

provide our advisors with a complete overview of the project;

receive our advisors’ comments and feedback at a timely point in our planning;

introduce our advisors to one another and some of the project team.