Research on Disaster Communications

Abstract

From our experience the Great East Japan Earthquake in March 2011 to help out the people in the affected area in terms of IT support such as internetworking and providing PCs, we came across an interesting issue concerning collaboration with people including supporters as well as the victims. We call this problem disaster communications. We also came to know the needs for disaster information processing as there was no such systems to manage shelters, goods distribution and volunteers. On the other hand such systems have been researched in the United States of America and Europe in terms of information processing for emergency management to a great extent. While we have had many natural disasters in Japan, only a very few of the researchers in computer science and information systems have been working on this issue. From this perspective, we try to identify the information required at disaster in this research. In particular, we explored the needs and seeds for disaster information processing in Iwate, Japan. We interviewed some supporters at Iwate in March 2011 such as local government officials, doctors and university administrators and found the situation awareness was required desperately in the beginning of the disaster. This paper reports our project of interviewing people who worked on disaster relief during the emergency response as well as our trial of a system for situation awareness based on the results from our interviews.

An IoT-based infrastructure to enhance self-evacuations in natural hazardous events

“…Several researchers have raised the need to include the evacuees as formal actors in disaster relief efforts, given that first response organizations are usually not able to deal with these activities in short time periods [25,36]. Therefore, civilians acting as human-sensors can provide information about the status and evolution of both, the extreme event and the evacuation process [4,27,34,7].…”

Issues in the Use of the Recovery Watcher for Situation Awareness in Disaster and Inclusive Communications

“…However, we could make use of the system for rescue and response at the early stage of disaster management. We interviewed officers, doctors and volunteers who worked for the earthquake and tsunami emergency response in Iwate Prefecture at the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011 and found that information for situation awareness is needed desperately for the first responders in the beginning of disaster including rescue and response operations [4,12]. For the use of emergency response, the images need to be uploaded more frequently.…”

Recovery Watcher: A Disaster Communication System for Situation Awareness and Its Use for Barrier-Free Information Provision

“…Moreover, we learned that Hiltz and Plotnick started interviewing risk managers on the use of social media [6,7]. Consequently, we interviewed officers, doctors and volunteers who worked for the earthquake and tsunami emergency response in Iwate and found that information for situation awareness is needed desperately for the first responders [8,9].…”

“…From this perspective, we try and use our IT knowledge to implement systems to be used in disaster response and recovery so that we could see what could be usable. We have implemented some systems required to help out the disaster area [10], such as an unattended store service with a POS system with prepaid cards [11], designed for a use in a trusted community, in temporary housing, the tsunami information system based on Open Street Map(OSM), and a recovery watcher system to keep people being aware of how recovery goes in the disaster area by reporting images from the disaster area [9,12]. We describe particularly on the recovery watcher system which was originally designed for the recovery phase in the disaster management cycle [5], but could be used for situation awareness in the early stage of emergency response as well.…”