User participatory sensing for disaster detection and mitigation in urban environments

Abstract

Pervasive communication technologies have opened up the opportunities for citizens to cope with disasters by exploiting networked mobile devices. However, existing approaches often overlook the brittleness of the technological infrastructures and rely heavily on users’ manual inputs. In this paper, we propose a robust and resilient sensing environment by extending and integrating cooperative location inference and participatory sensing using smartphones and IoTs. The proposed approach encourages proactive engagement in disaster mitigation by means of everyday data collection and end-user deployment of IoT sensors.