112.social: Design and Evaluation of a Mobile Crisis App for Bidirectional Communication between Emergency Services and Citizens

Emergencies threaten human lives and overall societal continuity, whether or not the crises and disasters are induced by nature, such as earthquakes, floods and hurricanes, or by human beings, such as accidents, terror attacks and uprisings. In such situations, not only do citizens demand information about the damage and safe behaviour, but emergency services also require high quality information to improve situational awareness. For this purpose, there are currently two kinds of apps available: General-purpose apps, such as Facebook Safety Check or Twitter Alerts, already integrate safety features. Specific crisis apps, such as KATWARN in Germany or FEMA in the US, provide information on how to behave before, during and after emergencies, and capabilities for reporting incidents or receiving disaster warnings. In this paper, we analyse authorities’ and citizens’ information demands and features of crisis apps. Moreover, we present the concept, implementation and evaluation of a crisis app for incident reporting and bidirectional communication between authorities and citizens. Using the app, citizens may (1) report incidents by providing a category, description, location and multimedia files and (2) receive broadcasts and responses from authorities. Finally, we outline features, requirements and contextual factors for incident reporting and bidirectional communication via mobile app

Wertekonflikte in der Nutzung sozialer Medien zur Vernetzung ungebundener HelferInnen in Krisensituationen – Ein Value-Sensitive Design Ansatz

Bereits während des Hochwassers in Mitteleuropa 2013 und der Flüchtlingskrise in Europa ab 2015 wurde deutlich, dass freiwillige HelferInnen die Bewältigung von Krisensituationen unterstützen. Durch die vermehrte Koordination der Helfenden, auch unter Einsatz sozialer Medien, kommt es zunehmend zu Konflikten zwischen den teilweise kollidierenden Erwartungshaltungen periodisierter Werte der eingebundenen Akteure. Die Entwicklung von Kollaborationswerkzeugen mit Hilfe der Methode des Value-Sensitive Designs kann bereits im Vorfeld solche Konflikte aufzeigen und gezielt verhindern oder moderieren. Dazu wurde in einer Fallstudie anhand des Hochwassers 2013 induktiv abgeleitet, welche Werte und Erwartungen die unterschiedlichen Stakeholder haben, und welche Konflikte sich daraus im Hinblick auf die Anforderungen ergeben. Diese Studie zeigt insbesondere die Konfliktpotenziale für freiwillige HelferInnen in sozialen Medien in Bezug auf den Schutz der Privatsphäre und vor Diskriminierung auf und leistet damit einen Beitrag für die Konflikt-Optimierung und Akzeptanzsteigerung des Einsatzes sozialer Medien im Katastrophenschutz

112.SOCIAL: Design and Evaluation of a Mobile Crisis App for Bidirectional Communication between Emergency Services and Citizen

Emergencies threaten human lives and overall societal continuity, whether or not the crises and disasters are induced by nature, such as earthquakes, floods and hurricanes, or by human beings, such as accidents, terror attacks and uprisings. In such situations, not only do citizens demand information about the damage and safe behaviour, but emergency services also require high quality information to improve situational awareness. For this purpose, there are currently two kinds of apps available: General-purpose apps, such as Facebook Safety Check or Twitter Alerts, already integrate safety features. Specific crisis apps, such as KATWARN in Germany or FEMA in the US, provide information on how to behave before, during and after emergencies, and capabilities for reporting incidents or receiving disaster warnings. In this paper, we analyse authorities’ and citizens’ information demands and features of crisis apps. Moreover, we present the concept, implementation and evaluation of a crisis app for incident reporting and bidirectional communication between authorities and citizens. Using the app, citizens may (1) report incidents by providing a category, description, location and multimedia files and (2) receive broadcasts and responses from authorities. Finally, we outline features, requirements and contextual factors for incident reporting and bidirectional communication via mobile app

Strategy for processing and analyzing social media data streams in emergencies

People are using social media to a greater extent, particularly in emergency situations. However, approaches for processing and analyzing the vast quantities of data produced currently lag far behind. In this paper we discuss important steps, and the associated challenges, for processing and analyzing social media in emergencies. In our research project EmerGent, a huge volume of low-quality messages will be continuously gathered from a variety of social media services such as Facebook or Twitter. Our aim is to design a software system that will process and analyze social media data, transforming the high volume of noisy data into a low volume of rich content that is useful to emergency personnel. Therefore, suitable techniques are needed to extract and condense key information from raw social media data, allowing detection of relevant events and generation of alerts pertinent to emergency personnel

Information Refinement Technologies for Crisis Informatics: User Expectations and Design Implications for Social Media and Mobile Apps in Crises

In the past 20 years, mobile technologies and social media have not only been established in everyday life, but also in crises, disasters, and emergencies. Especially large-scale events, such as 2012 Hurricane Sandy or the 2013 European Floods, showed that citizens are not passive victims but active participants utilizing mobile and social information and communication technologies (ICT) for crisis response (Reuter, Hughes, et al., 2018). Accordingly, the research field of crisis informatics emerged as a multidisciplinary field which combines computing and social science knowledge of disasters and is rooted in disciplines such as human-computer interaction (HCI), computer science (CS), computer supported cooperative work (CSCW), and information systems (IS). While citizens use personal ICT to respond to a disaster to cope with uncertainty, emergency services such as fire and police departments started using available online data to increase situational awareness and improve decision making for a better crisis response (Palen & Anderson, 2016). When looking at even larger crises, such as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, it becomes apparent the challenges of crisis informatics are amplified (Xie et al., 2020). Notably, information is often not available in perfect shape to assist crisis response: the dissemination of high-volume, heterogeneous and highly semantic data by citizens, often referred to as big social data (Olshannikova et al., 2017), poses challenges for emergency services in terms of access, quality and quantity of information. In order to achieve situational awareness or even actionable information, meaning the right information for the right person at the right time (Zade et al., 2018), information must be refined according to event-based factors, organizational requirements, societal boundary conditions and technical feasibility. In order to research the topic of information refinement, this dissertation combines the methodological framework of design case studies (Wulf et al., 2011) with principles of design science research (Hevner et al., 2004). These extended design case studies consist of four phases, each contributing to research with distinct results. This thesis first reviews existing research on use, role, and perception patterns in crisis informatics, emphasizing the increasing potentials of public participation in crisis response using social media. Then, empirical studies conducted with the German population reveal positive attitudes and increasing use of mobile and social technologies during crises, but also highlight barriers of use and expectations towards emergency services to monitor and interact in media. The findings led to the design of innovative ICT artefacts, including visual guidelines for citizens’ use of social media in emergencies (SMG), an emergency service web interface for aggregating mobile and social data (ESI), an efficient algorithm for detecting relevant information in social media (SMO), and a mobile app for bidirectional communication between emergency services and citizens (112.social). The evaluation of artefacts involved the participation of end-users in the application field of crisis management, pointing out potentials for future improvements and research potentials. The thesis concludes with a framework on information refinement for crisis informatics, integrating event-based, organizational, societal, and technological perspectives

WSN based sensing model for smart crowd movement with identification: a conceptual model

With the advancement of IT and increase in world population rate, Crowd Management (CM) has become a subject undergoing intense study among researchers. Technology provides fast and easily available means of transport and, up-to-date information access to the people that causes crowd at public places. This imposes a big challenge for crowd safety and security at public places such as airports, railway stations and check points. For example, the crowd of pilgrims during Hajj and Ummrah while crossing the borders of Makkah, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. To minimize the risk of such crowd safety and security identification and verification of people is necessary which causes unwanted increment in processing time. It is observed that managing crowd during specific time period (Hajj and Ummrah) with identification and verification is a challenge. At present, many advanced technologies such as Internet of Things (IoT) are being used to solve the crowed management problem with minimal processing time. In this paper, we have presented a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) based conceptual model for smart crowd movement with minimal processing time for people identification. This handles the crowd by forming groups and provides proactive support to handle them in organized manner. As a result, crowd can be managed to move safely from one place to another with group identification. The group identification minimizes the processing time and move the crowd in smart way