## 1 Introduction  
Disaster warning and surveillance systems have been widely used by official agencies to send to the public emergency information before disasters strike. In addition to recent advances in technologies for the prediction and detection of disasters and ICT (Information and Communications Technology) support infrastructures for the distribution of warnings messages, international emergency data exchange language standards have been adopted for encoding alert messages. For example, the XML-based standard, Common Alert Protocol (CAP) [1], has been adopted in the USA, Canada, Australia and parts of the Asian Pacific region, including Taiwan and Japan. Official agencies in these regions can now generate accurate warnings of many types of natural disasters a few seconds or minutes before they occur. The warning messages are encoded in CAP format and broadcasted to the public, so that people can stay away from harm. For example, in Taiwan, CAP-formatted warning messages issued by the Central Weather Bureau, the Water Resource Agency, Soil and Water Conservation Bureau and the Directorate General of Highways are converted by Google Public Alert [2] into short messages and delivered to mobile phone users via the Google Now personal assistant. Although the public can get warning messages issued by official agencies, the warnings are not utilized as effectively as they can be today. CAP alert messages, though machine-readable, are consumed mostly by people to date. Limitations in human reaction time can significantly limit the effectiveness of the warnings. A better alternative is to deliver the messages directly to smart devices and applications that can respond with humanly impossible speed and to let them take appropriate actions to keep people away from any potential danger and their belongings from being damaged. Because earthquakes hit Taiwan frequently, we designed and implemented an active disaster response system (ADRS) to respond to earthquakes. Due to great advances in geotechnical earthquake engineering, a modern earthquake early warning system (EEWS) can determine the magnitude and the location of an earthquake in three seconds after an initial P-wave has been detected [3,4]. This computation time is expected to get shorter and shorter in the near future. In Taiwan, strong motion monitors deployed densely can detect a significant earthquake and determine the affected area almost instantaneously after an earthquake occurs. According to the report of the National Center for Research on Earthquake Engineering (NCREE), in Taiwan, it takes 30 s for earthquake shock waves to propagate from Taichung (the middle of Taiwan) to Taipei (the north of Taiwan). The distance between the two places is around 150 km. An EEWS has already been deployed and proved that it can provide a warning to Taipei 27 s prior to the arrival of shock waves after an earthquake, such as 921 earthquakes [5], happening in the middle of Taiwan. With ADRS, there will be enough time for people to move to safe places, to put sensitive equipment into a safe mode and to automatically open elevator doors before the major shaking occurs. In order to realize the abovementioned idea, we designed and implemented a proof of concept prototype, named the active disaster response system. We implemented ADRS by Tibbo EM1000 TEVmicrocontrollers [6], which can interpret standardized alert messages published by official agencies and automatically perform emergency tasks when an earthquake is expected to strike in order to prevent the loss of lives, to reduce the chance of injuries and to minimize economic losses. For example, ADRS will shut off natural gas intake valves to prevent fire, open escape doors to ease evacuation, bring elevators to the nearest floor to evacuate trapped people, turn off electric appliances to avoid electrical fire, and so on, when receiving a strong earthquake alert before ground movement begins.