Towards more practical information sharing in disaster situations

Abstract

This paper presents how to design a more practical information sharing service for disaster situations based on the requirements learned from many disaster experiences in Japan in the past. In designing technologies to be used in disaster situations, it is important to add resiliency that can handle changes in the situation. To provide more people with an information sharing service, the technologies should be independent of Internet availability and should work on many types of user devices. We develop and evaluate a resilient information sharing platform and some applications, all of which can work with Wi-Fi and a web browser. This paper also details the results of field experiments and describes the importance of the “service usability” concept in making those technologies truly practical.