research-article

Help beacons: design and evaluation of an ad-hoc lightweight s.o.s. system for smartphones

Authors:

Leonardo Ramirez,

Alexander Boden,

Dave Randall, and

Andreas ZimmermannAuthors Info & Claims

CHI '14: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

April 2014

Pages 1485 - 1494

https://doi.org/10.1145/2556288.2557002

Published: 26 April 2014 Publication History

Abstract

We present the design and evaluation of a lightweight mobile S.O.S. system that facilitates ad-hoc communication between first responders and victims in emergency situations. Our approach leverages established protocols and standards in unforeseen ways to provide a platform supporting the creation of short-lived communication links. The system comprises two mobile applications: one victim application that allows the broadcasting of distress signals by a novel use of Wi-Fi SSIDs; and a responder application that allows first responders to discover and trace the people broadcasting the signals. The main difference of our system with other platforms enabling communication in crisis situations is that our system is independent from existing network infrastructure and runs on off-the-shelf, commercially available smartphones. We describe the results of our evaluation process in the context of both a design evaluation during a real-world emergency response exercise and of two user workshops in preparation for an upcoming large-scale exercise.

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Cited By

Recki LKroth KKrauß VKlöckner LPakusch CBossauer PBöhm LPeters FStöbitsch ABoden A(2024)Digitale VerantwortungVerbraucherinformatik10.1007/978-3-662-68706-2_5(203-260)Online publication date: 25-Mar-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-68706-2_5
Schlosser PMatthews B(2022)Designing for Inaccessible Emergency Medical Service Contexts: Development and Evaluation of the Contextual Secondary Video ToolkitProceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3491102.3517538(1-17)Online publication date: 29-Apr-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3491102.3517538
Skaug KSmebye ETola BJiang Y(2022)Keeping Connected in Internet-Isolated Locations2022 Seventh International Conference On Mobile And Secure Services (MobiSecServ)10.1109/MobiSecServ50855.2022.9727216(1-7)Online publication date: 26-Feb-2022
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Index Terms

Help beacons: design and evaluation of an ad-hoc lightweight s.o.s. system for smartphones
1. Human-centered computing
  1. Collaborative and social computing
  2. Human computer interaction (HCI)

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cover image ACM Conferences

CHI '14: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

April 2014

4206 pages

ISBN:9781450324731

DOI:10.1145/2556288

General Chairs:
Matt Jones
Swansea University, Wales, UK
,
Philippe Palanque
Université Paul Sabatier, France
,
Program Chairs:
Albrecht Schmidt
University of Stuttgart, Germany
,
Tovi Grossman
Autodesk Research, Canada

Copyright © 2014 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 26 April 2014

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CHI '14: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

April 26 - May 1, 2014

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CHI '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 465 of 2,043 submissions, 23%;

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Schlosser PMatthews B(2022)Designing for Inaccessible Emergency Medical Service Contexts: Development and Evaluation of the Contextual Secondary Video ToolkitProceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3491102.3517538(1-17)Online publication date: 29-Apr-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3491102.3517538
Skaug KSmebye ETola BJiang Y(2022)Keeping Connected in Internet-Isolated Locations2022 Seventh International Conference On Mobile And Secure Services (MobiSecServ)10.1109/MobiSecServ50855.2022.9727216(1-7)Online publication date: 26-Feb-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/MobiSecServ50855.2022.9727216
Gorovits ADoke KZhang LZheleva MBogdanov P(2021)CORE: Connectivity Optimization via REinforcement Learning in WANETs2021 18th Annual IEEE International Conference on Sensing, Communication, and Networking (SECON)10.1109/SECON52354.2021.9491597(1-9)Online publication date: 6-Jul-2021
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Subasinghe INittel SCressey MLandon MBajracharya P(2019)Real-time mapping of natural disasters using citizen update streamsInternational Journal of Geographical Information Science10.1080/13658816.2019.163918534:2(393-421)Online publication date: 15-Jul-2019
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Rejiba ZMasip-Bruin XJurnet AMarin-Tordera ERen G(2018)F2C-Aware: Enabling Discovery in Wi-Fi-Powered Fog-to-Cloud (F2C) Systems2018 6th IEEE International Conference on Mobile Cloud Computing, Services, and Engineering (MobileCloud)10.1109/MobileCloud.2018.00025(113-116)Online publication date: Mar-2018
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