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Providing real-time assistance in disaster relief by leveraging crowdsourcing power

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Abstract

Crowdsourcing platforms for disaster management have drawn a lot of attention in recent years due to their efficiency in disaster relief tasks, especially for disaster data collection and analysis. Although the on-site rescue staff can largely benefit from these crowdsourcing data, due to the rapidly evolving situation at the disaster site, they usually encounter various difficulties and have requests, which need to be resolved in a short time. In this paper, aiming at efficiently harnessing crowdsourcing power to provide those on-site rescue staff with real-time remote assistance, we design and develop a crowdsourcing disaster support platform by considering three unique features, viz., selecting and notifying relevant off-site users for individual request according to their expertise; providing collaborative working functionalities to off-site users; improving answer credibility via “crowd voting.” To evaluate the platform, we conducted a series of experiments with three-round user trials and also a System Usability Scale survey after each trial. The results show that the platform can effectively support on-site rescue staff by leveraging crowdsourcing power and achieve good usability .

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Notes

  1. http://www.ushahidi.com.

  2. sinsai.info.

  3. Since “off-site users” of crowdsourcing disaster management platforms often voluntarily provide their help, we do not differentiate the two terms throughout this paper.

  4. http://www.usar.nl/upload/docs/insarag_guidelines_july_2006.pdf.

  5. http://www.ict-societies.eu/.

  6. http://linkeddata.org/.

  7. http://stackoverflow.com.

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Acknowledgments

This work is supported by the EU FP7 Project SOCIETIES (No. 257493). The authors would like to express their great appreciation to Dr. Jacqueline Floch, Dr. Michael Angermann, Yiorgos Bouloudis, Bernhard Perun, Gunther Berthold, as well as all other colleagues and trial participants, for their help in the preparation and execution of the user trials. The authors would also like to thank the editors and reviewers for the valuable comments and suggestions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Telecommunication Network and Services, Institut Mines-TELECOM/TELECOM SudParis, 91011, Evry, France

    Dingqi Yang & Daqing Zhang

  2. Institute of Communications and Navigation, German Aerospace Center, Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany

    Korbinian Frank, Patrick Robertson & Michael Lichtenstern

  3. Telecommunications Software and Systems Group, Waterford Institute of Technology, Waterford, Ireland

    Edel Jennings & Mark Roddy

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  1. Dingqi Yang
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  2. Daqing Zhang
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  7. Michael Lichtenstern
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Correspondence to Dingqi Yang.

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Yang, D., Zhang, D., Frank, K. et al. Providing real-time assistance in disaster relief by leveraging crowdsourcing power. Pers Ubiquit Comput 18, 2025–2034 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-014-0758-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-014-0758-3

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