Mobile Sensing and Communication for Risk Mitigation Before and After Disaster Events

Jane Louie Fresco Zamora ( 1261029 )


This dissertation presents the use of mobile devices as specific ICT solutions for some natural disasters inorder to tackle current issues with existing technologies for mitigating risks before and after disaster events. Several modern ICT applications nowadays adapt to disaster-related issues that enables the society to mitigate the risks brought about by these events. However, with the onset of climate change, more individuals especially those who are considered to be at a disadvatage are increasingly vulnerable to disaster risks. Dynamic improvements in ICT applications, thus, are yet to be continually implemented.

In this research, the motivation is to save lives from the impending risks of naturally caused disasters by providing the opportunity to be informed and communicate despite the limited resource. Technology is speedily growing but not all individuals have the same rate of access and adaptation to the growth. Moreover, in the event of a large-scale disaster, all things essential to the function of one system, i.e., communication towers, may be lost. Therefore, in this regard, there is a need for a low-cost and easily implementable technological countermeasure.

In this dissertation, specific implementations for information sharing by environmental observation and communication for disaster preparation and rescue, respectively, are proposed. Particularly, because of the limited resources in some parts of the world, not all individuals have easy access to weather information which makes them vulnerable to flooding and landslides, for instance, during heavy rains. In this regard, the research focus was to examine easily implementable and low-cost alternatives to weather observation. In addition, because communication channels can be lost during a large-scale disaster such as in a devastating earthquake, quick countermeasure for communication to rescue victims for within the critical 72 hours was investigated in this research.