Early Warning Systems and Disaster Management using Mobile Crowdsourcing

Human populations are constantly under threat from disasters. The nature of the disaster influences the kinds of threats that humans are exposed to by physical phenomena such as extreme weather, seismic, volcanic and human activities like terrorism activities. In this study, an early warning system with capability of a mobile platform is developed to be used by various users to report disasters happening within their neighborhood using their mobile platforms which could either be android, smartphone, tablet, windows mobile and laptops. The expected belief is that when such information is delivered to the disaster management personnel, other survivors and volunteers who in turn use the information to plan their operations to suit unfolding events on a given disaster. The system is designed to channel information through crow-sourced web based approach of disaster reporting. The resulting information is then made available to public free of charge since it can be hosted on free disaster dedicated websites such as Ushaidi platform. Moreover, a crowd-sourced web platform that allows survivors or other people outside the disaster area to report the kind of disaster that is happening in a given place has been integrated; as well as capability to interact with various aspects of social media such as Facebook, Twitter, email, or even website. Since a number of communication systems overlook the disaster victims, I believe that this application of early warning system will be a valuable tool in promoting the application mobile technologies in disaster management as well as providing feedback from disaster victims.