Assessing the Impact of Crowd Tasking Apps on Resuscitation Success: The Case of Sudden Cardiac Arrests in Germany

Sudden cardiac arrest (SCA) is among the three most prominent causes of death in industrialized nations. Therefore, experts are calling for solutions, including IT-systems to mobilize volunteers. SCA emergencies require immediate action and advanced first aid skills. As of today, emergency services are often unable to arrive at the victim in time, and laypeople on the scene frequently fail to conduct resuscitation properly. One approach to solve this problem is to rely on skilled volunteers, who are alerted by smartphone apps. Among others, German researchers are currently developing a crisis response system with a crowd tasking app. It aims to help reduce the effects of large-scale events, but also of ad-hoc incidents including SCA. This paper describes an approach to determine the potential of the system to increase the survival rate of SCA illustrated based upon data from Germany. Its concept was analyzed by experts and benefited from their feedback.BMBF, 13N12813, Verbesserte Krisenbewältigung im urbanen Raum durch situationsbezogene Helferkonzepte und Warnsysteme (ENSURE

Sudden cardiac arrest and the role of crowd tasking apps for risk mitigation

ABSTRACT Sudden cardiac arrest (SCA) is among the three most prominent causes of death in industrialized nations. Therefore, experts are calling for solutions, including smartphone-based systems to mobilize volunteers. German researchers are developing a crisis response system with a crowd tasking app. It aims to help reduce the effects of large-scale events, but also of ad-hoc incidents including SCA. This paper describes an approach to determine the potential of the system to increase the survival rate of SCA illustrated by an example. Its concept was analyzed by five experts from three countries and benefited from their feedback

An investigation into the role of crowdsourcing in generating information for flood risk management

Flooding is a major global hazard whose management relies on an accurate understanding of its risks. Crowdsourcing represents a major opportunity for supporting flood risk management as members of the public are highly capable of producing useful flood information. This thesis explores a wide range of issues related to flood crowdsourcing using an interdisciplinary approach. Through an examination of 31 different projects a flood crowdsourcing typology was developed. This identified five key types of flood crowdsourcing: i) Incident Reporting, ii) Media Engagement, iii) Collaborative Mapping, iv) Online Volunteering and v) Passive VGI. These represent a wide range of initiatives with radically different aims, objectives, datasets and relationships with volunteers. Online Volunteering was explored in greater detail using Tomnod as a case study. This is a micro-tasking platform in which volunteers analyse satellite imagery to support disaster response. Volunteer motivations for participating on Tomnod were found to be largely altruistic. Demographics of participants were significant, with retirement, disability or long-term health problems identified as major drivers for participation. Many participants emphasised that effective communication between volunteers and the site owner is strongly linked to their appreciation of the platform. In addition, the feedback on the quality and impact of their contributions was found to be crucial in maintaining interest. Through an examination of their contributions, volunteers were found to be able to ascertain with a higher degree of accuracy, many features in satellite imagery which supervised image classification struggled to identify. This was more pronounced in poorer quality imagery where image classification had a very low accuracy. However, supervised classification was found to be far more systematic and succeeded in identifying impacts in many regions which were missed by volunteers. The efficacy of using crowdsourcing for flood risk management was explored further through the iterative development of a Collaborative Mapping web-platform called Floodcrowd. Through interviews and focus groups, stakeholders from the public and private sector expressed an interest in crowdsourcing as a tool for supporting flood risk management. Types of data which stakeholders are particularly interested in with regards to crowdsourcing differ between organisations. Yet, they typically include flood depths, photos, timeframes of events and historical background information. Through engagement activities, many citizens were found to be able and motivated to share such observations. Yet, motivations were strongly affected by the level of attention their contributions receive from authorities. This presents many opportunities as well as challenges for ensuring that the future of flood crowdsourcing improves flood risk management and does not damage stakeholder relationships with participants

Imagery to the Crowd, MapGive, and the CyberGIS: Open Source Innovation in the Geographic and Humanitarian Domains

The MapGive initiative is a State Department project designed to increase the amount of free and open geographic data in areas either experiencing, or at risk of, a humanitarian emergency. To accomplish this, MapGive seeks to link the cognitive surplus and good will of volunteer mappers who freely contribute their time and effort to map areas at risk, with the purchasing power of the United States Government (USG), who can act as a catalyzing force by making updated high resolution commercial satellite imagery available for volunteer mapping. Leveraging the CyberGIS, a geographic computing infrastructure built from open source software, MapGive publishes updated satellite imagery as web services that can be quickly and easily accessed via the internet, allowing volunteer mappers to trace the imagery to extract visible features like roads and buildings without having to process the imagery themselves. The resulting baseline geographic data, critical to addressing humanitarian data gaps, is stored in the OpenStreetMap (OSM) database, a free, editable geographic database for the world under a license that ensures the data will remain open in perpetuity, ensuring equal access to all. MapGive is built upon a legal, policy, and technological framework developed during the Imagery to the Crowd phase of the project. Philosophically, these projects are grounded in the open source software movement and the application of commons-based peer production models to geographic data. These concepts are reviewed, as is a reconception of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) called GIS 2.0

NWSI Maritime Gray Zone Warfare Innovation Workshop

17 USC 105 interim-entered record; under review.This report summarizes the NWSI Maritime Gray Zone Warfare Innovation Workshop, the first effort of the NWSI Maritime Gray Zone Research Task Force (MGZ RTF). Three teams were facilitated through a rapid concept generation process using tools of user-centered design to respond to the design challenge: How might emerging technologies, new operational concepts, and new force capabilities contribute to a more effective force in the geo-political competitive phase to deter adversaries, strengthen allied relations, and shape the strategic and operational environment?UNCLASSIFIED – approved for unlimited distributio

Leveraging and Fusing Civil and Military Sensors to support Disaster Relief Operations in Smart Environments

Natural disasters occur unpredictably and can range in severity from something locally manageable to large scale events that require external intervention. In particular, when large scale disasters occur, they can cause widespread damage and overwhelm the ability of local governments and authorities to respond. In such situations, Civil-Military Cooperation (CIMIC) is essential for a rapid and robust Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief (HADR) operation. These type of operations bring to bear the Command and Control (C2) and Logistics capabilities of the military to rapidly deploy assets to help with the disaster relief activities. Smart Cities and Smart Environments, embedded with IoT, introduce multiple sensing modalities that typically provide wide coverage over the deployed area. Given that the military does not own or control these assets, they are sometimes referred to as gray assets, which are not as trustworthy as blue assets, owned by the military. However, leveraging these gray assets can significantly improve the ability for the military to quickly obtain Situational Awareness (SA) about the disaster and optimize the planning of rescue operations and allocation of resources to achieve the best possible effects. Fusing the information from the civilian IoT sensors with the custom military sensors could help validate and improve trust in the information from the gray assets. The focus of this paper is to further examine this challenge of achieving Civil-Military cooperation for HADR operations by leveraging and fusing information from gray and blue assets

A service-oriented middleware for integrated management of crowdsourced and sensor data streams in disaster management

The increasing number of sensors used in diverse applications has provided a massive number of continuous, unbounded, rapid data and requires the management of distinct protocols, interfaces and intermittent connections. As traditional sensor networks are error-prone and difficult to maintain, the study highlights the emerging role of “citizens as sensors” as a complementary data source to increase public awareness. To this end, an interoperable, reusable middleware for managing spatial, temporal, and thematic data using Sensor Web Enablement initiative services and a processing engine was designed, implemented, and deployed. The study found that its approach provided effective sensor data-stream access, publication, and filtering in dynamic scenarios such as disaster management, as well as it enables batch and stream management integration. Also, an interoperability analytics testing of a flood citizen observatory highlighted even variable data such as those provided by the crowd can be integrated with sensor data stream. Our approach, thus, offers a mean to improve near-real-time applications

A Survey of Enabling Technologies for Smart Communities

In 2016, the Japanese Government publicized an initiative and a call to action for the implementation of a Super Smart Society announced as Society 5.0. The stated goal of Society 5.0 is to meet the various needs of the members of society through the provisioning of goods and services to those who require them, when they are required and in the amount required, thus enabling the citizens to live an active and comfortable life. In spite of its genuine appeal, details of a feasible path to Society 5.0 are conspicuously missing. The first main goal of this survey is to suggest such an implementation path. Specifically, we define a Smart Community as a human-centric entity where technology is used to equip the citizenry with information and services that they can use to inform their decisions. The arbiter of this ecosystem of services is a Marketplace of Services that will reward services aligned with the wants and needs of the citizens, while discouraging the proliferation of those that are not. In the limit, the Smart Community we defined will morph into Society 5.0. At that point, the Marketplace of Services will become a platform for the co-creation of services by a close cooperation between the citizens and their government. The second objective and contribution of this survey paper is to review known technologies that, in our opinion, will play a significant role in the transition to Society 5.0. These technologies will be surveyed in chronological order, as newer technologies often extend old technologies while avoiding their limitations

Demonstrating the capacity of online citizen science mapping software to communicate natural hazards and engage community participation

OpenStreetMap (OSM) is an online citizen science mapping software program that can be used to empower communities and encourage participation in natural hazards planning. This is a multi-disciplinary thesis demonstrating OSM’s effectiveness as a tool in this capacity through a literature review, in depth case study, and functional application. The literature review and case study focus on applications of OSM in other contexts, like the Nepal earthquakes in 2015. The functional application addresses the impacts of climate change in the Elk River watershed. Flooding here has become more frequent and intense as a result of climate change. The Flood Solution Strategy is prepares people for extreme flooding events in Fernie, B.C. This research utilized a unique methodology in using OSM as both a tool for engaging the community and communicating the risk of flooding. The result is a flood hazard map created through a science-policy-stakeholder partnership complimenting a larger initiative.MITAC