Patent ID: 7363052

Claim:
A method for responding to an incident potentially involving release of hazardous substances and for rapid distribution of information collected at the incident location by a local user to remote recipients for improved response to the incident, comprising: deploying a portable computer at the incident location including wireless network communications transceiver means on said computer for establishing two-way communication with one or more wireless communications networks available at the event location; deploying a plurality of portable local data collection peripherals remotely to said mobile computer at said incident location each of said peripherals being enabled for wireless communication with said portable computer and said mobile computer being configured for automatically recognizing and logging-in said data collection peripherals within effective communication range of the mobile computer; said data collection peripherals once deployed being operative for collecting local data without attention by said local user; a communication routing program on said portable computer for routing locally collected data from said plurality of diverse portable local data collection peripherals for wireless transmission to one or more destinations selectable by said local user; and wherein a local user status query program periodically prompts the local user for a status input, and transmits the status input to a remote monitoring location, and actuates an alarm signal to the remote monitoring location in the absence of such a status input responsive to the periodic prompting.