disaster relief

This study sets out to understand how social media is being used in disaster and emergency situations. Research thus far has established the importance of social media in disaster and crisis communication but neglects to describe why social media are important. To establish best practices of social media use in a disaster and why they should be used, this study interviewed six communication or social media experts in the field of disaster relief.

This joint effort draws on the wealth of existing expertise across numerous organizations and previous research to codify a series of best conduct practices for the use of SMS in disaster response. This guideline document is a collaborative work in progress and therefore neither fully comprehensive nor entirely complete. This effort focuses exclusively on “natural” disasters and thus currently excludes reference to political crises and complex humanitarian emergencies.

For disaster exploration and surveillance application, this paper aims to present a novel application of a multi-robot agent based on WSN and to evaluate multi-hop communications supported by robotics used in subterranean tunnel. The paper proposes a Primary-Scout Multi-Robot System (PSMRS) and reports on the implementation of a chain topology in a subterranean environment using a trimmed ZigBee2006 protocol stack to build the multi-hop communication network.

This paper proposes a geo spatial information repository for initial condition reporting and updating to guide search and rescue operations and deployment of equipment with safety considerations for the rescuers in large scale disaster response scenarios.

This module provides government officials and policymakers with an overview of disaster risk management (DRM) and presents an approach for identifying information needs in DRM. It then matches the needs with ICT. The module also describes and provides examples of existing ICT applications for DRM and discusses benefits and barriers for utilizing ICT in DRM.