Idea: Building in mobile phone beacon technology to help search and rescue operations

Telcoms infrastructure is often down or saturated during a disaster, however even if a mobile device cannot be used to dial a call or send an SMS, they inherently have another capability. Mobile devices are effectively radio transmitters that with very little modification should be able to act as locating beacons to locate trapped people in the locality of say about  within a 200-500m radius.

Mobile phones are quite pervasive now with high penetration even in developing nations . These days most people carry a mobile phone wherever they go.  During my visit to Taiwan, I got an opportunity to speak to a leading OEM chip chip manufacturer, who’s chip functionally ends up in a great amount of phones today and they informed that this very doable. 

Please do not confuse this with locating mobile phone using cell towner triangulation techniques as that lacks the granularity to locate people in for example a trapped building block. With this you should be able to say the number of phone in for example a collapsed building and make a guess at the amount of people trapped. The natural attenuation of the signal also should help build a suitable “metal detector” like tool to direct a search and rescue operation to the mobile phone and the trapped people or bodies with them.

You might also counter saying that GPS technology can be a better locator, however GPS technology requires a clear line of sight and even to SMS their location it all requires active input by a potentially unconscious person and a level of literacy on mobile functionality beyond the basics.  If anything the only input required would be to say someone is OK, so that their signal no longer contributes to the noise of multitudes of signals of the number of people with mobile phone in say a 500m radius. Or they might annotate their signal with a request for urgent help or with other information if they so wish, but that would be optional. One issue is battery consumption as most of the time mobile phones are not transmitting, but are passive receivers which require consumes far less battery power. Transmitting a beacon will have to be done in very energy efficiently way. Like a periodic beep and powered for say a maximum range of 500m.

Yes you might worry about privacy or abuse in non-disaster times, in people being able to locate you, and there should be a way for the user to turn it off when needed or it is something that is turned on only on a cell broadcast by a tower. Detectors, which would be specialist directional devices that can locate people with such granularity has to be restricted to emergency use though legislation.

Additionally in more advanced phones you might be able to use it as simple short range walkie talkie to permit those that are trapped to communicate with the rescuers and broadcast a help message.

I am going to follow up on this possibility, which I thing will have a significant impact for search and rescue. Thoughts?

Virtusa donates to Rehabilitation Efforts

I have been involved in a Virtusa CSR initiative to support the rehabilitation efforts in Sri Lanka for the Commissioner General Rehabilitation's Office. There are a lot of rehabilitates who are interested in a vocation in ITES/BPO and thus Virtusa was invited to help guide a program that would help meet those aspirations. Virtusa decided to make a significant donation at this critical post-civil war period to help the rehabilitation efforts. The donation included a computer lab with 30 computers (running Ubuntu) in Vavuniya, support for defining a program for those interested in a vocation in ITES/BPO and the development of a software solution to help better manage the training and rehabilitation efforts. The lab was opened on the 1st week of April by the President of Sri Lanka, Mahinda Rajapakse and it was a great honor to be part of that ceremony.

A further1300+ ex-combatants were released that day to their families and it was a heartwarming sight to see those who have suffered so much due to the civil war being reunited with their families with a fresh outlook for a peaceful future. Some of these kids are so talented and it is sad to see that they wasted so much of their lives being trained instead as lethal weapons. We hope they will have a better future in peaceful Sri Lanka.

The event also gave me another opportunity to observe the President quite close and I continue to be impressed with his charisma and down-to-earth nature with people, especially in this environment, where he was surrounded by ex-combatants, who not too long ago would have taken every opportunity to do him harm (as mandated by their previous commanders).

I was also very proud of our Virtusa team and leadership that gave their full backing for this initiative, given it's relevance to peace building post-civil war. I also had to opportunity to work with the Sri Lanka Army these past few months (from end of last year) on this initiative and I consistently found that everyone I met was very professional, ethical in their approach and disciplined on delivery. It was a pleasure and a honor to work with them and  we would not have been able to contribute on our CSR goals without their vision for rehabilitation and encouraging support of our contributions.

There is still a lot of work to do and you still find remnants of the war scattered around, yet you can see the progress being made on the ground. We hope and pray for a peaceful and prosperous Sri Lanka of the future.

Ushahidi and Sahana will work closely together in disaster response

I had an opportunity to meet Juliana Rotich, Co-Founder and Program Director of Ushahidi during the III Congress in Spain and we had a great discussion on how Sahana and Ushahidi could collaborate more moving forward building from our strengths and partnering on disaster response. We had been collaborating recently during the Haiti Response. The way Ushahidi and Sahana organizes itself as projects are very similar based on Free and Open Source Source principles and we also even share the technology stack (PHP), thus integration would be quite easy. We have also arranged for our development teams to meet for an integration hackerton. Juliana also became a good friend and here we posing for that "formal" landmark handshake between Ushahidi and Sahana to pledge work closely together in disaster response.:-)

Sahana at Relief 02 at Camp Roberts, California

We had a fantastic two weeks at Camp Roberts and accomplished a great deal for Sahana. This included the use of a $400 (two years ago price) eeePC/Netbook as our primary data collection server, pulling WMS layers from mosaiced and geo-referenced UAV and satellite imagery of the Camp Roberts experiment site, configured an SMS gateway running on a Windows-based server using Cygwin and SMSTools and a Nokia 3220 phone to send and receive SMS messages from Sahana, an Android application to send in structured SMS messages to Sahana with embedded GPS coordinates, exporting of a KML feed from Sahana to Google earth to name a few of the new functionality we added.

The new SMS capabilities which I worked on gives Sahana the ability to serve as an incredibly powerful crowdsourcing and disaster situation awareness application. New SMS functionality included:

• A new format for a structured SMS message to be sent from any cell phone to Sahana.
• The ability to register a user name to a cellphone number.
• The mapping of the SMS messages to a DHS symbolset of incident information based on feature class reported by the Android and SMS message.
• We developed the ability to poll the Sahana server and pull information about the last known location of a registered Sahana user
• Or the search of the last know report based on a keyword

This all was applied in an integrated field experiment and was also present to some key representatives from organizations such as FEMA and DHS

You can find the full details and pictures on Mark's talksahana post here:

http://talksahana.com/?p=303