SOS4ALL

Best Student Project - A Real-time Emergency Reporting and Response System.

  • Completed: 2023
  • Context: M.Sc. Student Project, TUW, Austria
  • Supervisor: Ignateva Olesia
  • Tools: PHP, HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, Leaftlet, PostgreSQL/PostGIS, Publish-Subscribe
  • Keywords: Incident, Emergency, Location Based Service, Web Mapping, Spatial Database
  • Try it: http://sos4all.wheregeospatial.com
  • Poster:: Poster

The Problem

The dominant language in Austria is German which newcomers often struggle to master its use for their daily interactions. Hence, this language barrier poses a serious challenge in the critical situation of an emergency where a foreigner needs to communicate with response teams such as Police, Fire Service, and Ambulance, which has a negative impact on rescue operations.

The Solution

Together with my project partners, Ching-Ting Chia and Yanning Wang, we built an interactive Web GIS system for reporting emergency using a mobile application which sends the GPS coordinates of the incident location as well as a comment and a picture taken from the camera or gallery to a backend dashboard monitored by the Emergency Response Teams.

Video Demo

See how it works

How we built it

We developed a spatial database using PostgreSQL/PostGIS and imported the Austria boundary as a table. Afterwards, a new table was created to store the emergency reports sent from the mobile application. The backend developed in PHP has an API that receives the mobile reports and processes it to the database as well as publishing it to the web browser using the PubNub Publish-Subscribe service to achieve a real-time experience. The mobile application is developed in android/java.

Challenges we ran into

The android code base has made a lot of changes which required a lot of learning to understand the new developments. In addition, the mobile GPS accuracy is not good enough which requires a good number of satellites to have an improved accuracy. For this reason, we send the GPS accuracy in meters as part of reported incident information.

What we're proud of

We are typically proud of the overall looks of the application, the real-time feature, integration with the Google Maps routing system and how all the cartographic technologies we have used play together seamlessly.

What we learned

We learned the application of multiple modern cartographic technologies including Cartographic Information Systems, Cartographic Interfaces, Multimedia Cartography, Web Mapping, and Location Based Services in solving a problem.

What's next

Due to time constraint, features including User Identity, Chatting and Language Translation were deferred for future development. In addition, a user-centered Design approach was not feasible. These would be the next steps for taking the system to the next level.

Sources

[1] Faßmann, H. (2004). Geography in Austria. Belgeo. Revue belge de géographie, (1), 17-34. Retrieved 23.06.2023 from
https://journals.openedition.org/belgeo/10056
[2] Gass, V., Schmidt, J., Strauss, F., & Schmid, E. (2013). Assessing the economic wind power potential in Austria. Energy policy, 53, 323-330. Retrieved 23.06.2023 from
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2012.10.079
[3] Staněk, K., Friedmannová, L., Kubíček, P., & Konečný, M. (2010). Selected issues of cartographic communication optimization for emergency centers. International Journal of Digital Earth, 3(4), 316-339. Retrieved 23.06.2023 from
https://doi.org/10.1080/17538947.2010.484511