Thursday, November 13, 2014

GEOFENCING POST DISASTER SCENARIO USING ANDROID APP

ABSTRACT
Nepal is ranked one of the most vulnerable country to disasters in the world due to its topographical features, adverse geo climatic conditions, environmental degradation, urbanization etc. Although everyone acknowledges this fact, there still lacks a proper and well-coordinated disaster management system which includes stages of mitigation, preparedness, relief, response and recovery. Nepal Government along with coordination with different NGO and INGO are working collaboratively to build an effective management system. But at present the existing applications, tools and systems have not been enough to address all issues of disaster management. Although Nepal has been able to build a system effective for disaster preparedness through the involvement of organizations like NSET, but the works on response, recovery and relief phase during post disaster situation seems not enough. Since, the market and reach of mobile phones to people is increasing day by day and mostly the popularity of smartphones is very high and among all available smartphones in market, Android has been the long leading smartphones in the market, the use of android smartphones would be an effective medium of communication, sharing information and sending and receiving alerts in a disaster scenario. The android’s penetration to users is increasing so rapidly that it could be a quick information sharing tool. Realizing the essence and usefulness of android to be used in the disaster management system seems to be an effective tool, an android application named D-Fencing was developed. This app was developed using Android SDK with ADT plugin in eclipse IDE. Bluestack App player was used to test the application and PostgreSQL was used for database management. The users of android app can be benefited by being able to receive alerts and notifications via their application notifications on their mobile screen based on the location of the device (which consequently is their location if they are carrying it),and given that their location is within or inside a defined geofence. A geofence here in the app is a virtual perimeter- a virtually fenced off geographic location of a circular shape with fixed radius and center coordinates in latitude and longitudes in WGS coordinate system defined by the system administrator who can be admin of the disaster management system. The geofence defined by the admin also contains name and the message for the geofence that the users entering into that virtual geofence are expected to receive as notifications in their smartphones.

No comments:

Post a Comment