Bot-Based Emergency Software Applications for Natural Disaster Situations

Abstract

Upon a serious emergency situation such as a natural disaster, people quickly try to call their friends and family with the software they use every day. On the other hand, people also tend to participate as a volunteer for rescue purposes. It is unlikely and impractical for these people to download and learn to use an application specially designed for aid processes. In this work, we investigate the feasibility of including bots, which provide a mechanism to get inside the software that people use daily, to develop emergency software applications designed to be used by victims and volunteers during stressful situations. In such situations, it is necessary to achieve efficiency, scalability, fault tolerance, elasticity, and mobility between data centers. We evaluate three bot-based applications. The first one, named Jayma, sends information about affected people during the natural disaster to a network of contacts. The second bot-based application, Ayni, manages and assigns tasks to volunteers. The third bot-based application named Rimay registers volunteers and manages campaigns and emergency tasks. The applications are built using common practice for distributed software architecture design. Most of the components forming the architecture are from existing public domain software, and some components are even consumed as an external service as in the case of Telegram. Moreover, the applications are executed on commodity hardware usually available from universities. We evaluate the applications to detect critical tasks, bottlenecks, and the most critical resource. Results show that Ayni and Rimay tend to saturate the CPU faster than other resources. Meanwhile, the RAM memory tends to reach the highest utilization level in the Jayma application.

Productivity of incident management with conversational bots-a review

“…[65], [66] Motivates people to lead a healthy lifestyle Motivating people to adopt healthy lifestyle behavior. [67] It can be used in various aspects Chatbots can fulfill a variety of functions in a virtual environment, which is configurable and adaptable.…”

“…From what is shown in Table 2, it can be extracted that the benefits of using chatbots are diverse [67], [68], and transversal to health fields such as [23], [24], [31]- [33], and [66], customer service according to [25]- [30], [42], [46]- [51], [54]- [62], education according to [35]- [41], and trade in general according to [60]. From what is shown in Table 3, it can be extracted that the types of chatbots are called virtual assistants or agents, conversational, health, a chatbot with AI, natural language processing (NLP), and information management.…”

“…After the exhaustive analysis of the manuscripts, 5 processes that optimize conversational chatbots have been found, e.g. : Table 9 shows the processes that the chatbots optimize: according to [24], [27], [42] bots are employed in bot training processes to feed its knowledge base; on the other hand, in [23], [43]- [45], [50], [51], [56], [62], [66]. The use of conversational bots was found to be part of the teaching process [21], [22], [25], [26], [29]- [31], [40], [41], [53], [64], it was realized that healthcare processes have been altered and have incorporated the use of chatbot technology with patients and professionals.…”

Geo Collector Bot: A Telegram-Based Open Toolkit to Support Field Data Collection

“…The reason is two-fold. First, mobile client apps are not always cross-platform, therefore preventing their use in the field by a significant number of potential contributors (Ovando-Leon et al, 2022). This is the case of the ODK on iOS devices, for example.…”

“…Nevertheless, limitations connected to the final user experience are common in many of these apps (Steinberg et al, 2019). On one hand, mobile client apps are not always available or optimized for all mobile OS, therefore preventing their use in the field by a significant number of potential contributors (Ovando-Leon et al, 2022). On the other hand, each of these frame- * Corresponding author works requires the installation of a specific mobile app on the user's device.…”