Mobile Apps in Flood Disasters: What Information do Users Prefer?

Environment, Development and Sustainability

Natural events continue to take a heavy toll on human lives. Added to this are the challenge of dynamic at-risk settings, uncertainty, and increasing threats, which demand holistic, flexible, and quickly adaptable solutions. In this context, mobile applications are strongly emerging as communication tools that can assist in disaster reduction. Yet, these have not been sufficiently evaluated. In view of this, the aim of this research is to evaluate the adequacy of mobile applications in disaster risk reduction in reference to some of the deadliest natural events. To this purpose, a two-part methodology is developed. Firstly, a random sample of applications is evaluated and contrasted with the literature. Secondly, the viability of mobile applications is determined based on the Digital Application Potential Index proposed by the authors, cross-referenced in Geographical Information Systems with the WorldRiskIndex. The results show that most mobile applications limit their coverage ran...

International Journal of Research in Advanced Computer Science Engineering, 2022

Smartphones are being used for a wide range of activities including messaging, social networking, calendar and contact management as well as location and contextaware applications. The ubi quity of handheld computing technology has been found to be especially useful in disaster management and relief operations [4]. Our focus is to enable developers to quickly deploy applications that take advantage of key sources that are fundamental for today's networked citizens, including Twitter feeds, Facebook posts, current news releases, and government data. These applications will also have the capability of empowering citizens involved in crisis situations to contribute via crowdsourcing, and to communicate upto-date information to others. We will leverage several technologies to develop this application framework, namely (i) Linked Data principles for structured data, (ii) existing data sources and ontologies for disaster management, and (iii) App Inventor, which is a mobile application development framework for non-programmers. In this paper, we describe our motivating use cases, our architecture, and our prototype implementation.

International Journal of Engineering Applied Sciences and Technology, 2019

Disaster preparedness and risk reduction is one of the critical areas that must be consider in today's changing era because of the climate change. In the recent years, many people have died because of unpreparedness to different disasters and risks particularly related to calamities like typhoon and earthquake. In the Philippines, typhoon is one of the calamities that takes many lives, yearly. One of the main reasons was the lack of the necessary knowledge to reduce the risks and to equip oneself on what to do before, during, and after a calamity. This study focused on developing a mobile application that provides information about disaster and risk reduction which was called iRubwat an Ilocano term for preparation.

Procedia Engineering, 2015

With the reactive nature of disaster relief efforts, the response time of NGO's and humanitarian organizations is critical. Organizations cannot predict the next crisis, nor can they build a catch all solution for any future problem. Consequently, the quicker a system is in place following a crisis, the more data can be collected to improve the relief efforts. Data is vital in assessing the severity of a crisis, informing organizations on how to prepare or give aid, and informing the community about an event. Mobile phones in general, and smartphones in particular, are an ideal tool for the collection of this valuable data. The development effort required to create smartphone applications is usually substantial. There are technical barriers to entry, and usually lengthy development times. Because of this, traditional mobile application development has been limited in its ability to help disaster relief. The Punya framework, presented in this paper, drastically shortens the development time required for Android applications, while supporting the communication and sensor features needed to acquire data during a crisis scenario. Punya's advanced sensor functionality, as well as its data capture and reporting components, allow organizations to build mobile applications quickly that can gather both user and context data as well as visualize results.

SinkrOn, 2019

Indonesia has 28 regions in the Republic of Indonesia Archipelago which are declared as areas prone to tectonic earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis. Among these are NAD, North Sumatra, West Sumatra, Bengkulu, Lampung, Banten, Central Java, and DIY in the south, East Java in the south, Bali, NTB, and NTT. Based on these facts, it can give an idea that the South East Java Province in particular has a high level of vulnerability when compared to other islands, when viewed from the total population density. Disasters can occur anytime and anywhere so people need to increase awareness, awareness, and preparedness, which is most at risk during the emergency response phase, where in that phase the situation is very conducive and the increasing hoaxes about data and information on disasters that spread in the community, along with the development of technological advancements, we need a mobile application that can provide the latest data and information routinely in the community. Referring...

Joint Proceedings of the Workshop on AI Problems and Approaches for Intelligent Environments and Workshop on Semantic Cities - AIIP '13, 2013

Smartphones are being used for a wide range of activities including messaging, social networking, calendar and contact management as well as location and context-aware applications. The ubiquity of handheld computing technology has been found to be especially useful in disaster management and relief operations. Our focus is to enable developers to quickly deploy applications that take advantage of key sources that are fundamental for today's networked citizens, including Twitter feeds, Facebook posts, current news releases, and government data. These applications will also have the capability of empowering citizens involved in crisis situations to contribute via crowdsourcing, and to communicate up-to-date information to others. We will leverage several technologies to develop this application framework, namely (i) Linked Data principles for structured data, (ii) existing data sources and ontologies for disaster management, and (iii) App Inventor, which is a mobile application development framework for non-programmers. In this paper, we describe our motivating use cases, our architecture, and our prototype implementation.

International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction

How members of society interact during disasters has significantly changed because of technological innovations and new media evolution. The modality changes in crisis communications, such as the popular rise of mobile applications use, may pose risks to the public if not properly studied, with results adopted and utilised. Crisis informatics, as an emerging field of research, studies the sociotechnical advancements in disaster management. The purpose of this review is to summarise the involvement of mobile applications (apps) in crisis informatics literature and to scope needs and opportunities for further research on citizen's use of mobile apps during disasters. This review uses a scoping process to identify and analyse 49 crisis informatics articles that focus on mobile apps in disaster situations. The study investigates the various mobile apps that engage with the crowd during disaster situations. Findings show that apps used in disasters can be generalpurpose apps or built-for-disaster-purpose apps. This review further focuses on the built-fordisaster-purpose apps and shows the various interactions these apps foster with the public and the apps' value-added contributions throughout the disaster life cycle. Communication during disasters between the public and authorities has become more dispersed. To fully augment disaster resilience through technology it is important that future research should engage in user-centred studies to gain more insights from the citizens' on using mobile apps. This study highlights three areas of need for future research: engagement of apps prior disaster response stage, public behaviour and motivation towards the use of apps, and usability of mobile apps.

Proceedings of the First International Conference on Social Science, Humanity, and Public Health (ICOSHIP 2020), 2021

The development of Information Technology is very fast in the world, including the mobile technology. Mobile is a cellular communication tool provide convenience for all sectors, including government agencies, to be able to produce information quickly, precisely and completely in receiving and conveying information. Indonesia is one of the countries with a relatively high incidence of disasters. In the first week of early 2020, 7 tornado disasters, 5 floods and 1 landslide were recorded, with 23 dead and missing victims, 2 injured and 393 affected. This condition cannot be separated from the geographical factors of Indonesia country, which consists of an archipelago, has active volcanoes, vast oceans and also because of the low behavior of protecting the environment. Almost all parts of Indonesia are susceptible to disasters. Many applications related to natural disaster management have been more developed, but in general the applications have not yet fully reach the needs of stakeholders and victims. So it is necessary to develop an application system for emergency response and disaster management. This study use a prototype model, through the collection of stakeholder needs followed by making a prototype design and evaluation. The application were designed to support various features of the current digital era. The hope, this prototype can be developed to more practical applications in order to facilitate emergency response and disaster management quickly, precisely, and accurately.

International Journal of Disaster Risk Science

The public has access to a range of mobile applications (apps) for disasters. However, there has been limited academic research conducted on disaster apps and how the public perceives their usability. This study explores end-users’ perceptions of the usability of disaster apps. It proposes a conceptual framework based on insights gathered from thematically analyzing online reviews. The study identifies new usability concerns particular to disaster apps’ use: (1) content relevance depends on the app’s purpose and the proximate significance of the information to the hazard event’s time and location; (2) app dependability affects users’ perceptions of usability due to the life-safety association of disaster apps; (3) users perceive advertisements to contribute to their cognitive load; (4) users expect apps to work efficiently without unnecessary consumption of critical phone resources; (5) appropriate audio interface can improve usability, as sounds can boost an app’s alerting aspect; ...

2017

This paper presents the features and architecture of a mobile-based application that is developed to assist flood victims and rescue teams in search and rescue operations.Mobile Flood Assistant (Mo-FA) is an integrated Android-based mobile application to assist Malaysian citizens who live in flood prone areas with an early warning alert and to facilitate the current practice in search and rescue operation.Mo-FA consists of 2 main modules namely Flood Information and Notification Module, and e-SOS Module.The Flood Information and Notification Module aims to provide early warning to the public on possible flood occurrence.It is also able to provide flood-related information such as the amount of rain and river water level using the data obtained from Department of Irrigation and Drainage (DID). Relevant information such as the nearest evacuation centers and routes will be displayed on a map to facilitate affected victims to move to a safe area. The second module aims to facilitate the...