Using Social Media Surveillance in Order to Enhance the Effectiveness of Crew Members in Search and Rescue Missions

Abstract

Social media nowadays are linked almost with every aspect of our lives. They can and have been used to explain social relations, human behaviors, political affections, product preference, just to mention a few applications of social network analysis. Moreover, there are cases in which social media surveillance can be proved valuable for saving human lives as the case which is studied in this book chapter. More specifically, we attempt to test how information collected from social media can improve the ability of a Search and Rescue (SAR) crew to detect people in need using visual search. For the purposes of the study, we simulated a SAR mission in a 3D virtual environment and we asked the study participants to locate refuges needing assistance in different areas of an island. The initial information provided to the volunteers was differentiated and the experiments showed that volunteers who were searching for clues based on input from local social media posts were able to track all the people in need and thus social media surveil-lance was proved to be very promising if it is applied in such cases.