Responding to natural disasters such as floods has always been a challenge for tropical countries such as Thailand and its neighbors. With the changing climate, such disasters are now also becoming more common even in temperate countries such as Germany. Each year natural disasters cause enormous damage, displacing people, disrupting their livelihoods, and even taking lives. Helping those directly impacted requires making first response efforts as effective and efficient as possible. Fortunately, advances in information and communication technology now provide us with the tools to better support our first responders by providing accurate and up-to-date information to those coordinating the relief efforts, providing more efficient communication, and more directly linking citizens to the rescue efforts.
This project will develop the communications infrastructure to link rescue units to the rescue operations command center and to integrate the information from the rescue units to provide the command center a comprehensive picture of the evolving situation. In addition, the system will provide a communications channel for citizens to report rescue needs and to receive instructions using smart phones. This latter functionality will be built based on the Mobile4D system developed in the Capacity Lab of the BSCC.
The project is funded by DTI (Thailand) and is a collaboration between DTI, the Faculty of ICT at Mahidol University, and the BSCC. Development is being coordinated with other countries in ASEAN so as to move toward a common disaster management infrastructure to better coordinate relief efforts.