Depiction of an Interactive Prevarication System during Exigency Situation Shayhan Ameen Chowdhury, Ahmed Imteaj, Bhaskar Ray and Muhammad Estiak Omar Department of Computer Science and Engineering International Islamic University Chittagong Chittagong-4203, Bangladesh. Email:
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[email protected] Abstract— Natural calamity is one of the major issues that works as a hindrance in the progression of an underdeveloped country like Bangladesh. The clutch of destructive natural disasters terribly attack millions of people and their property in almost every year. To mitigate such disruption, we developed an android based system through which people can get facilitation during natural calamities. The proposed system can help a user by generating weather update, nearby cyclone centers, hospitals, police and fire stations and also pointing those locations along with direction on the map. The user can also share his current location by SMS and the location map through image sending functionality. In addition, the user can see different reports (both in map and as a custom list view) submitted by the other users about unconventional incidents prevailed in any particular location and can also post a report on any escapade if he wants. The system has also a feature of emergency alert service through which an auto-message is dispatched to some emergency contact numbers. Keywords—Natural disaster; distress center; alert service;report; notify; android.
I.
INTRODUCTION
A natural disaster is an unexpected event which occurs due to natural processes of the earth; example includes cyclone, flood, earthquake, tsunamis and other geological processes. Every year, a lot of people died, severely injured or become homeless because of such disasters. During the natural calamities, the telecommunication systems merely work and people can hardly communicate with others. As a result, it becomes even more difficult to tackle the unexpected situation. During a natural disaster, a lot of people need to shift in the nearby natural disaster shelter. Considering this, we have developed a system where the user can find out the nearby cyclone center along with distance and direction and other stuffs such as: nearby hospitals, police stations or fire stations in an efficient way. In addition, a user can share his location perfectly if the user feces any problem using auto-sending message features of our system. This system contains a reporting section. User can report an incident anytime from anywhere. Other users can observe the details of the incident through the map. This reporting section would help other users to become aware about any incident within an area. Our proposed system has also a survival strategy section which would help users to get suggestion in different situations and they also get notified by the admin in an emergency.The main contribution of our system is to integrate
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a lot of useful functionality in a common platform which works both in online and offline. The system could act as a survival assistant in any distressed situation as it has different informative functionalities such as: Weather update, Search for shelter during emergency, Search for police stations, hospitals and fire stations, Sharing location map by image sending, Incident report shows in the map as well as in custom list view, Incident report post from any location, Providing survival strategy, User’s current location sharing through SMS, Sending alert notification during crisis, etc. We have discussed on some relevant papers in section II. In section III we have explained the system functionality with proper demonstration. Later we have shown experimental result and survey summary focusing the necessity of our proposed system. Section V contains some future extension of our work and finally we conclude the paper. II.
LITERATURE REVIEW
The world is terribly affected by natural calamities every year. A lot of work has already done to reduce the loss due to such disasters. The author in [1] proposed a location based early disaster warning and evacuation system using Google Map. Updates of the disaster (tsunami, cyclone or flood) are put on DMS by the local weather office. To get automatic notification of upcoming disaster device user registers on Disaster Management Server (DMS) else the user can get manual notification. The user keeps in touch with DMS to get most renew data obtained by GSM. But the system does not work in offline and only shows the rescue team on the Google map. Rekha et. al. in [2] presented an Emergency Management System (EMS), which enables smart phone based ad-hoc communications at disaster times over Wi-Fi. The person in an emergency or anybody at the emergency site will call the EMS at avail service. Location Coordinates are sent on each request. The system works on the principles of client-Server system, wherein the server responds to the requests of the Clients. The Client and Rescue Application was Implemented as an Android Application and the Sever is implemented as a Web based Java Application. But their system only based on sending messages by the admin to the victim and they did not use any kind of map to show the location in their system. A multi-faceted information portal is developed in [3] for citizens and emergency personnel during disasters and emergency response. This portal is the result of a collaboration between the RESCUE project at UC-Irvine and the City of Ontario, California Fire Department (OFD). The portal provides a wide range of real-time information in crisis
iCEEiCT 2016
Fig. 1. Proposed system architecture.
situations, such as situation summaries, shelter info. etcshelter information, and aggregated services such as family reunification and donation management. But the paper has a unclear demonstration of their system and they do not provide any emergency alert service generated by the user.
the problem is that it is a web based system and not responsive to use in portable device like mobile. Sahana Disaster Management System doesn't use any GPS system and doesn't support offline mode. So if any power disruption occurs during a disaster or crisis, the system will not work.
The authors in [4] developed a system named HelpMe, a self-learning opportunistic ad-hoc system, which enables smartphone-based ad-hoc communications at disaster times over Wi-Fi. As the system is implemented for ad-hoc network, it has a huge disadvantage if we consider distance matter.
Similarly, the authors in [11] also proposed a web-based system named ‘The RESCUE Disaster Portal for Disasters and Emergency Response’ and has the similar drawbacks.
Catarchi et. al. [5] proposed a system which consists of a front- and a back-end layer. The front-end layer is composed of several front-end teams of first responders, and the backend layer is an integrated peer-to-peer network that lets frontend teams collaborate through information exchange and coordination. But the system has very limited functionalities. The authors of [6] proposed Area Mail disaster information service provided by NTT Do Como for tsunami alert and evacuation system for helping fishery workers. Area mail service capable of sending notification about damage due to disaster in limited areas, but for overall population it is an inefficient approach. Australia and South Korea are planning to use satellite communication for disaster management when the failure of mobile network occurs [7], [8], [9]. After the tsunami that hit Sri Lanka on December 26 2004, the Sahana [10] FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) project was built. Key applications of Sahana projects are missing persons registry for finding missing persons, an organizational registry for a relief organization, coordination and tracking, request management system for tracking and matching specific aid or relief requests and offers, camp and shelter registry, volunteer management, inventory management to track supplies, and situational awareness. But
The author in [12] proposed a disaster management system which can help the user to send his current location using GPS through a message and can see nearby shelter zone on the Google map. But the system cannot work in offline, has limited feature and does not have the capability to display the nearby hospitals, fire service or police stations which are crying need during a disaster. Shanthini et. al. [13] suggested an idea of sending alert service by a trusted party during a disaster. As a result, the registered user will be acknowledged about the upcoming disaster through a message or audio clip. But the user would not be able to report anything about any witness he observed and there is no opportunity for the user to generate alarm service if any problem arises. A portable mobile phones can play an important role to resolve the crisis or disastrous situation in many ways, such as monitoring, communication, warning dissemination, evacuation, rescue and relief aid. Moreover, the approach of smart phones supporting GPS functionality can play a vital role in the crisis or disastrous situation management. There are plethora of applications that will benefit users in an emergency on a specific service. But none of them actually provides the integration of various functionalities in a single platform that works both in online and offline. Through our proposed system, the user can get the opportunity to fetch necessary information both in online and offline.
Fig. 2. Context diagram.
III.
SYSTEM IMPLEMENTATION
A. System Architecture The architecture displays the main components of the system (fig. 1). It shows the working of server database and android database, GPS and GCM cloud service. The server database information is fetched by sending HTTP request to the web server and the web-server provides the data in JSON format to android device. GPS satellite is used to get the current location. B. Context Diagram The context diagram of our proposed system is presented in fig. 2. Here we have propounded the overall data flow of our system among different entities. The main entities of our system are weather server, admin, user, map server and GSM and the data flows are shown by the arrow sign. C. Mobile Application Our proposed system is a mobile application named “Interactive Crisis Resolve System” and for the successful deployment of our system, we have used Eclipse IDE, JAVA, MySQL, SQLite, PHP, Java Script, Jquery, GCM (Google Cloud Message) service, GPS (Global Positioning System) and XML layouts.
mode, online or offline. By providing district, upazila and union information a disaster victim can find all nearest cyclone shelter locations according to the victim’s present location via the google map (fig. 4, 5). 3) Cyclone Center Module (Offline Mode): During an emergency or disaster situation power disruption or network failure can be occurred. So if there is no internet connection is available during crisis situations, the user can use our cyclone shelter offline module. If a user wishes to see the location of the shelter, an offline OpenStreetMap will display the shelter and user current location. To implement this module we have used SQLite offline database, Osmdroid library, and Mobile Atlas Creator. Using Mobile Atlas Creator we have computed an offline OpenStreetMap for Chittagong region (fig. 6). 4) Nearest Police/Fire Station and Hospital location: During an emergency situation, this module will find out the nearest police stations, fire brigade stations and hospital location within a radius limit based on user current location. Besides, user can search nearby police/fire station and hospital location for a specific location from the different part of the country shown in fig. 7.
1) User registration and GCM registration process: When a user does register for the first time in our application, on background a GCM registration process will issue a unique GCM id for user android device. After receiving a unique GCM registration id, our application will send GCM registration id along with user information to our server. Our server will store GCM registration id and user information in the database (fig. 3). 2) Cyclone Center Module (Online Mode): To implement this module initially we have stored district, upzila, union and cyclone shelter information in server side relational database table. We have also designed an interactive user interface for our mobile application end. At first user has to select the
Fig. 3. User registration process.
Fig. 4. Online cyclone center module.
5) Incident Report Section: In this module, report data will be collected from users. This module gives power to the registered user. A user could report what he knows or sees and other user instantly gets informed. A map will show all the events occurred in different location using different marker. If a user wants to report on any incident they have to pick a location from map, then a report form will be appeared. Report form contains title, incident type, severity level, source, description, impact statistics, photo, location and more. User can also take an image of the event instantly and attach it with the report. The user can search incident for a specific location or nearby to user current location. From the searched incident list user can view a specific incident's detail information. User can comment to share his opinion and can see other user comment about any incident (fig. 8, 9,10). 6) Help Message Sending Feature: Help message sending feature will let user to save some of his friends or family’s phone numbers. This feature sends an alert to those pre-stored contact with a message alerting them that the user needs assistance. Here user can store three contact numbers and an emergency SMS. User can also update this information if needed. We used unique shared preference memory to store this information. So if a user logout anytime and login later to our application, he/she will get this information preserved. And this feature will work in offline mode.
Fig. 5. Online Cyclone shelter details information with distance and path.
(a) (b) Fig. 8. (a) Incident report map (b) Reporting an incident. Fig. 6. Cyclone shelter details information with location (offline mode).
Fig. 7. Nearest Fire Station and Hospital location with path direction.
(a) (b) Fig. 9. (a) Report shows for a specific location (b) Detail of a report.
(a) (b) Fig. 10. (a) Help SMS Feature (b) User comment on a report.
7) Push Notification Alert: Govt. and institutions can send emergency alert to the citizens in emergency situations through our system. The push notification alert feature will help admin to send alert notification, such as alert signal, emergency news to registered user which is given in fig. 11. Whenever push notification is needed, our server will send a message to GCM(Google Cloud Message) server along with device registration id which is stored earlier in the databases. GCM server will deliver that message to all registered user mobile device using device unique registration ID. All registered user will receive this alert notification immediately. If any emergency contact number, web link is shared with an alert message, the user can directly call those numbers or visit those links from our application. 8) Survival Strategy: We know the world is constantly changing and becoming volatile each and every day. This feature includes instruction a person may use in those unexpected situations to save themselves. Here we have propounded a slight portion of this feature in fig. 12(a). 9) Weather Update: This feature brings all weather information available for the locations all around the world. The system generates current temperature, humidity, pressure, cloud condition for a specific location which is presented in fig 12(b).
(a) (b) Fig. 12. (a) Survival strategy (b) Weather update for a specific location.
Fig. 13. Admin panel of the system.
10) Admin Panel: In admin panel, the admin will be able to login, perform insert, update, delete operation on the shelter information table. Admin can verify, view and delete the incident report submitted by the registered user, send push notification alert to the users which is shown in fig. 13. IV.
TABLE I.
TESTING OF THE PROPOSED MODEL
Time
Scenario
5.00 pm
The experiment starts. Suppose weather office has announced about a new warning of a cyclone in the coastal region of Chittagong. Admin panel sends alert message to all registered users in Chittagong.
5.05 pm
Fig. 11. Notification received by registered users.
EXPERIMENTED RESULT
After developing our system, we have tested it by assuming that a cyclone will hit the coastal region of Chittagong. We have selected 15 different users and installed our application in their smartphones. The total scenario is given with time in table 1.
5.06 pm
Users received the alert message.
5.07 pm
User search for nearby shelter location. The system tracks user current location and generate all the nearby
shelter location pointing on the map. 5.08 pm 5.18pm
5.21 pm 5.23 pm
The user sends an image of a current location map and emergency help message to the pre-stored three numbers and follow the map. Three people injured and need to admit in a hospital immediately. The user search for the nearby hospital at once and the system computes all the nearby hospitals with approximate distance and direction on the map. Create a report about the disaster incident in Chittagong city to other users.
unexpected incident. The push notification alert feature also helps administrator to send alert notification, such as, disaster alert signal, emergency news to the registered users. During natural calamities, when the network does not work properly, our system can work perfectly as it has the capability to work both in online and offline. In the future, we have a plan to make the system in Belgali and to implement the system in windows and iOS platform also. Hopefully, the system works as an rescue assistant and helps the user to tackle any hurdle situations.
Other users comment and share their opinions.
REFERENCES [1]
We have analyzed the other disaster management systems and find out their qualities. After that, we have compared our proposed system model advantages than the related works and the result is given in table 2. TABLE II. SOFTWARE QUALITIES IN SOME EXITING DISASTER MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS AND OUR PROPOSED SYSTEM MODEL
Disaster Management Systems Envimon [14] Intergraph GeoMedia® [15] Sahana [10]
Decision Support Systems [16] Interactive Crisis Resolve System (our proposed system)
Software Qualities Availability Interoperability Interoperability Modifiability Modifiability Portability Scalability Usability Modifiability Availability Modifiability Interoperability Portability Scalability Usability
After constructing the application, we displayed it to various users to observe their responses. We installed the application in the user’s smartphone and ask them whether the application is helpful during disaster situations. The user responses are pictorially shown in fig. 14.
[2]
[3]
[4]
[5]
[6]
[7] [8] [9]
[10]
[11]
[12]
[13]
[14] [15] Fig. 14. User response.
V.
CONCLUSIONS
Our proposed system can help a user to overcome in different crisis situations. The system not only help a victim in a disaster situation, but it also aware other people about any
[16]
Amit Gosavi, S. S. Vishnu, “Disaster Alert and Notification System Via Android Mobile Phone by Using Google Map,” Internal Journal of Emerging Tehnology and Advanced Engineering, Vol. 4, issue 11, Nov. 2014. Rehka Jadhav, Jwalant Patel, Darshan Jain, Suyash Phadhtare, “Emergency Management System Using Android Application,” International Journal of Computer Science and Information Technologies(IJCSIT), Vol. 5 (3), 2014. Jay Lickfett, Naveen Ashish, Sharad Mehrotra, Nalini Venkatasubramanian and Jacob Green, “The RESCUE Disaster Portal for Disasters and Emergency Response,” in Proceedings of the 5th International ISCRAM Conference, Washington, DC, USA, May 2008. Mokryn, Osnat, et al. "Help me: opportunistic smart rescue application and system," in Proceedings of the 11th Annual Mediterranean Ad Hoc Networking Workshop (Med-Hoc-Net), pp. 98-105, Jun. 2012. Catarci, Tiziana, et al. "Pervasive software environments for supporting disaster responses," Internet Computing, vol. 12, issue 1, pp. 26-37, 2008. Teshirogi, Yasuaki, et al. "A proposal of tsunami warning system using area mail disaster information service on mobile phones," International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications Workshops, pp. 890-895, 26-29 May, 2009. Park, Dugkeun. "One of the Nowcasting Applications: Early Warning Systems for Natural Disasters in Korea." (2006). Duke H. Jeong, "National Disaster Warning System in Korea." (2009). Anas Aloudat and Katina Michael, "Toward the regulation of ubiquitous mobile government: a case study on location-based emergency services in Australia," Electronic Commerce Research, pp. 31-74, 2001. Samaraweera, Isuru, and Sheran Corera. "Sahana victim registries: Effectively track disaster victims," in Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (ISCRAM), 2007. Lickfett, Jay, et al. "The RESCUE disaster portal for disasters and emergency response." in Proceedings of the 5th International ISCRAM Conference, 2008. Varsha S. Sonwane, “Disaster Management System on Mobile Phones Using Google Map,” in Proceedings of International Journal of Computer Science and Information Technologies (IJCSIT), Vol. 5, 2014. S.Shanthini , Prof Mr.T. Jeba Moses, “Alert System from Disaster Management Server (DMS) By Trusted Disaster Party,” in Proceedings of International Journal of Engineering Research And Advanced Technology (IJERAT), Volume. 02 Issue.03, March-2016. T. Veijonen et al., “ENVIMON Disaster Monitoring System,” International Disaster Reduction Conference, 2006. Rocha, Artur, Bojan Cestnik, and Marco A. Oliveira. Interoperable geographic information services to support crisis management. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2005. Wallace, William A., and Frank De Balogh. "Decision support systems for disaster management," Public Administration Review, pp.134-146, 1985.
