Editorial: Digital innovations in disaster response: bridging gaps and saving lives

Digital technologies have become key components of contemporary disaster medicine. The Research Topic “Digital Innovations in Disaster Response: Bridging Gaps and Saving Lives” assembles 11 studies that examine how such technologies can strengthen preparedness, acute response, and health-system resilience across education and training, data-driven decision support, service delivery models, and information management. Together, these contributions outline both the potential and the current limitations of digital approaches in disaster contexts.

The first group of articles addresses education and training. Kern's Six Steps to Implement Simulation in Public Health Crisis applies the Kern curriculum development framework to simulation-based training in public health emergencies (Krouss et al.). The authors show how systematic needs assessment, clearly defined learning objectives, choice of appropriate simulation methods, implementation, and evaluation can be combined to develop crisis-relevant training rapidly while maintaining educational rigor. Simulation is thereby positioned as a planned curricular intervention rather than as an isolated exercise. Digital Cross-Sectoral Training with Dynamic Patient and Situation Simulation in the Context of Mass Casualty Incidents – Insights from the Research Projects D2PuLs and D2PuLs PRO builds directly on this approach by presenting a modular digital training environment for mass-casualty incidents (Konrad et al.). Dynamic patient models, which react physiologically to interventions, are linked with situation and manikin simulators so that complete rescue chains—from prehospital triage to in-hospital trauma care—can be trained. The study demonstrates that such digital simulations can supplement resource-intensive live exercises and generate detailed data for debriefing and quality improvement.

The systematic review Extended Reality Technology for Emergency Medical Service Training: Systematic Review adds an evidence-synthesis perspective on immersive training tools (Zhang, Meybodi, et al.). The review reports that virtual, augmented, and mixed-reality applications can improve engagement, perceived realism, and skill acquisition in emergency medical services, especially for rare or high-risk scenarios. At the same time, it highlights methodological limitations of existing studies and practical barriers such as ergonomic issues, user fatigue, and technical instability. Taken together, these three articles support the role of simulation and extended reality as important elements of disaster preparedness, while emphasizing the need for structured curricular integration and robust evaluation.

A second set of contributions focuses on artificial intelligence (AI) and data-driven decision support. Applications of Artificial Intelligence-Guided Clinical Decision Support in Disaster Medicine: An International Delphi Study explores, using a Delphi process, which AI functions are prioritized by disaster medicine experts (Franc et al.). The study finds broad agreement that AI is particularly useful for improving situational awareness and logistics—such as estimating affected populations, supporting hazard vulnerability analysis, allocating scarce resources, and optimizing patient distribution—whereas there is significantly more caution regarding AI involvement in ethically sensitive triage or end-of-life decisions. These results provide important guidance for the design of AI systems that align with practitioner expectations.

Anomaly detection and early risk identification in digital disaster response–based on deep learning in public health proposes a deep-learning framework to identify aberrant patterns in health-related data streams (Wu and Pan). By combining temporal and contextual modeling, the approach improves detection performance and reduces false alarms in comparison with traditional methods, illustrating how AI can support early recognition of emerging threats in digital operations centers. Filling the gap: Artificial Intelligence-driven One Health integration to strengthen pandemic preparedness in resource-limited settings extends the focus to One Health (Mukherjee et al.). This article discusses AI-enabled architectures that integrate human, animal, and environmental data for improved surveillance in low- and middle-income countries, and emphasizes governance, capacity building, and offline-capable, context-sensitive tools as prerequisites for effective deployment.

Two further articles analyse digital modalities that extend reach when physical access is limited. Telemedicine in Humanitarian Aid: Evaluation of Potentials & Challenges and an Implementation Trial in Ukraine describes the development and evaluation of a telemedicine platform for humanitarian use, including an implementation during the war in Ukraine (Habers et al.). The system was technically reliable and generally well accepted by health professionals, yet actual teleconsultation numbers remained modest. Identified barriers included integration into existing workflows, unclear responsibilities, and limited visibility of the service, underlining that organizational and process factors are critical for successful telemedicine in crises. Study on Medical Professionals' Acceptance and Factors Influencing Drone Delivery for Medical Supplies examines how healthcare professionals perceive drone-based medical logistics (Zhang, Xiao, et al.). Using a theory-based acceptance model, the study demonstrates that perceived usefulness, ease of use, safety, reliability, and organizational compatibility substantially influence willingness to adopt drone delivery, and concludes that targeted communication, demonstration projects, and co-design with users are necessary to move from pilot projects to routine use.

The Topic also includes three articles on the analysis of text and social media data. Sentiment Analysis of Social Media for Enhancing Disaster Response Strategies develops a sentiment-analysis framework adapted to crisis communication, addressing challenges such as irony, domain-specific vocabulary, and highly emotional language (Zeng). The findings indicate that temporal patterns of sentiment can provide additional insight into public anxiety, confusion, or trust and thereby inform content and timing of official communication. Enhancing Disaster Response through Named Entity Recognition of Critical Infrastructure and Medical Resources focuses on automatic extraction of key entities—such as healthcare facilities, infrastructure elements, and medical resources—from large textual corpora (Tang). Transforming unstructured text into structured information is presented to accelerate situational assessment and resource planning, provided that models are appropriately trained and validated for the disaster domain.

Finally, The Information Challenge in Public Health Crises: A Study on the reliability and readability of information provided by large language model for thunderstorm asthma examines large language models as direct information sources in crises (Zhu et al.). By assessing reliability and readability of responses to questions on thunderstorm asthma, the study shows that, although medically relevant content can often be generated, readability frequently exceeds recommended levels for lay audiences and quality differs between systems. The authors conclude that current models should not be used as unsupervised tools for public crisis communication and that professional review and adaptation to target groups are essential.

Overall, the 11 articles in this Research Topic demonstrate that digital innovations already contribute to multiple core domains of disaster medicine: competence development through simulation and extended reality, AI-supported situational awareness and One Health surveillance, new service-delivery models via telemedicine and drones, and enhanced information processing using sentiment analysis, named entity recognition, and large language models. At the same time, they consistently show that technological sophistication alone is insufficient. Acceptance by professionals, integration into organizational structures, rigorous evaluation in real-world environments, ethical and legal governance, and a strong focus on equity—particularly in resource-limited settings—are decisive for whether digital tools will truly bridge gaps and improve outcomes in disasters.

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Footnotes

Edited and reviewed by: Ives Hubloue, Vrije University Brussels, Belgium