Design and implementation of a social networking service-based application for supporting disaster medical assistance teams

Abstract

During the Kumamoto earthquakes in Japan, disaster medical assistance teams (DMATs) were dispatched for emergency support. Communication among DMAT members were primarily done via emails and phones, however, during this disaster, some teams also used LINE, a popular social networking service in Japan. Although this tool is simple to use, the teams had problems organizing various topics in a single chat room. In this paper, we propose an application that uses hashtags, which consists of two main units: (1) a bot that redirects messages to specific groups according to hashtags input by users; and (2) a system for logistic-support to manually apply hashtags to messages without tags, and to manually edit hashtags of already-tagged messages. User studies of two Kyoto University Hospital DMAT members were conducted, and through discussion, we found that the generality of the proposed application should be further considered for usage in other activities.