SociCare: Towards a Ubiquitous Context Aware Mobile Community Emergency System

Demographic change and the increase in life expectancy continuously increase the average age in our society. Depending on the physical shape and mental constitution, the elderly need assistance to master regular activities in their everyday lives, as well as urgent help in emergency situations (e.g. in case of a collapse or heart attack). Thereby, time is the most crucial factor. In some emergency cases such as heart attack, people might die if there is no immediate help available. This paper presents the design, architecture and prototype implementation of SociCare, a ubiquitous context aware mobile community emergency system. SociCare is designed to that help emergency call centers leverage and coordinate random voluntary helpers nearby the emergency location. It’s user interface enables human call center agents to quickly and easily identify, verify and select voluntary emergency helpers based on their context information. Such information can be for example current availability, distance to the emergency location and general skills and ability to provide first aid in the specific emergency case. Based on a prototype implementation of the developed concept an evaluation including for example field and usability studies will be conducted.