President Ma Ying-jeou called Tuesday for the application of WiMAX wireless broadband communication technology in disaster prevention. After attending a demonstration of how the technology could be used to improve medical care, the president said that if it could also be applied to transferring data on monitoring landslides and river levels, it would be helpful for disaster prevention. Ma said that three years ago when he attended a WiMAX demonstration, Taipei City, of which he was mayor at the time, was pushing for the spread of an inner city wireless network using Wi-fly technology. 'Taipei boasted the island's first ambulance fleet equipped with a Wi-fly communication system,' he said. Noting that many people were killed in landslides and flooding caused by Typhoon Morakot Aug. 8, 2009, Ma said that if disaster monitoring stations in landslide- prone areas could communicate their data to disaster-prevention centers and issue timely warnings, the death toll would not be so heavy. All of the 25 counties and cities in the country carry out regular disaster- prevention drills, but WiMAX is not widely used, he said. During Tuesday's demonstration, a film was screened to show a case in which a tourist suffered heart attack while sightseeing on Penghu. A heart monitoring device the man wore sent automatic warnings to a Taipei-based health center, which located the whereabouts of the man with the aid of a global positioning system and asked the nearest fire department to dispatch an ambulance to pick up the patient. While the ambulance rushed the patient to a hospital on Penghu, doctors at the Taipei health center examined the patient through a camera installed in the ambulance and instructed the ambulance crew to provide the man with paramedical aid. The system, which communicates through WiMAX, is especially helpful for heart attack patients and has succeed in allowing 8.5 percent of patients who are clinically dead upon arrival at hospitals to survive, according to its inventors. The demonstration took place on the sidelines of Computex Taipei 2010, one of the world's leading computer trade shows, which opened Tuesday and will run through June 5. 