Hazard Networking

Social networking for a hazardous world

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Inspiration

There are three important components required for an effective rescue and relief efforts during a large scale disaster are communication, coordination and collaboration. As of today, these three are failing because the existing solutions like CB Radio or Social Media for Emergency management fail to provide any of these elements reliably.

The following actual events are the main inspiration behind Hazard Networking:

  • During a large scale emergency your phone company blocks all your "non emergency" calls. So you can't really call your loved one or your cousin who lives two blocks away.
  • On 9/11, cops in New York city couldn't communicate with Fire fighters in New York as their CB radio networks we not inter-operable.
  • During Hurricane Sandy, first responders and volunteers from other states who went in to help the new York city area could not use their CB radios in the New York city area as their CB radio was not compatible with the existing CB radio network in New York.
  • During Fukushima disaster, many people did not know which direction to evacuate to and since they have no situational awareness and means of communicating with others, they ended up running towards the blown nuclear reactor, the wrong direction.
  • During London bombing, everyone tried to call someone and soon both the cell phone and land line companies blocked all the calls, as per protocol. CB radios worked sporadically as they too were overwhelmed. Doctors could not communicate with other emergency personnel, ambulances could not talk to their dispatch centers.
  • During London bombing, there were 6 major hospitals in a half mile radius of the bombing. Yet all the patients ended up going to just one hospital while other hospitals were waiting for bomb victims. Soon that one hospital was overwhelmed and many victims had to wait in a queue, making a bad situation even worse. This was mainly due to lack of communications of any sort.
  • During Philippines typhoon Haiyan, people sent images of disaster to a twitter hash-tag. These images and tweets were then tagged by about 700 volunteers around the world. This information was then summarized on to a map and given to first responders. The first Responders refused to use it as that information was too old, too slow and not dependable. Social Media for Emergency Management is not the solution for this problem.

How it works

Our product is an android app plus a smartphone accessory. This accessory is basically a radio transceiver and power supply that plugs into the smart phone. This accessory along with the app, transforms the simple smartphone into a machine that can communicate with other smartphones and CB radios. We custom design this accessory for our purpose.

Hazard networking provides communication Coordination and Collaboration. Here is how it works:

Communication: Hazard networking has the ability to record voice messages and broadcast them to other users over cellular internet. Using the accessory, users can also transmit and receive voice messages to and from CB radios as well.

Coordination: Hazard Networking has an event notification system on google maps, which provides situational awareness and coordination. People can see where other people are located on a live map.

Collaboration: Users can then decide to help other users through these events. They can then check in to the event location and provide the necessary help. They can then add updates to these events that they have checked into.

Networking Model: We are using a centralized p2p network called Pangaea (my fork of Sun JXTA) to carry voice messages and other application data. Using this p2p network, we can use the internet to transmit messages or we can transmit and receive voice messages using the radio transceiver accessory, if internet is not available. Also, we expect this p2p network to scale very well.

Challenges I ran into

The challenges I ran into are perception problems and technical problems. When I started talking to people, I realized that normal people don't get the importance of preparing for an emergency. They don't think they will ever be in a large scale disaster and so they are not too keen on the app. But then I spoke with people from Homeland Security and the City's disaster planning dept, they were very interested in an app like that. I also spoke with First responders, cops & firefighters and they loved the idea and were very interested in using the app. Based on their feedback, I believe that there is a market of 25 million first responders, 1.5 million fire fighters and about a million cops.

The technical challenges we faced are that there was no readily available P2P solution suitable for a smart phone. We had to fork an existing open source solution and make many modifications to it so that it works in android.

What's next for Hazard Networking:

We plan to approach a product designer to design our accessory to meet the first responders' standards. We plan on marketing our finished product to users like first responders, cops, fire fighters in USA. We will also target various Govt institutions in charge of Disaster Planning like Home Land Security, FEMA and so on. We hope to make some deals with companies that are selling Emergency Kits. We also will work on porting the android code into iOS and if necessary Windows 10. After that based on the user feedback, we will add further improvements and enhancements to the app.

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