Applied Project: The Collection of Information for Emergency Management: an Android Client with Web

Sharing emergency or disaster information in a timely manner is very important to people's life. With more and more people carrying a smart phone on daily basis, an emergency and disaster information sharing system accessible to smart phone users is necessary and could be very useful. This project is to construct a disaster and emergency information website that allows smart phone users to upload and search information about incidents such as car accidents on road or incoming severe weather conditions at anytime and from anywhere. The system comprises of five components: a MYSQL database, web services, an iPhone client, an Android client and a web application. The first three components have been developed by my colleague Tengda Wang [6]. The Android phone users can input emergency information to the server database through the Android client, or search for interested disaster information that has been stored in the database already. The Android client will display the retrieved data from the database on the Google map as pins. Clicking each pin, the corresponding detailed information about a particular disaster situation will show on the screen. The web application provides a web view of summarized information for all users who have a device with internet access. The resulting emergency information sharing system could be very useful in providing precautions to ordinary people on travel, or for officials of government emergency management agencies to analyze and use the emergency information collected by this system. Key words—Emergency Management, Android phone, Android SDK, web application, Google maps Javascript API