MOBILE APPLICATION FOR CRISIS SITUATIONS IN A UNIVERSITY CAMPUS

As mobile applications benefit from an increasing interest, especially among younger generations, their use for reporting critical situations becomes relevant in a university environment, with the aim of reducing material damages and protecting people. Due to the multitude of mobile device owners, new apps may serve for informing about the potential risks and creating situation awareness, based on events and responses specific to students and academics. This fits the existing trend to take advantage of the mobile technologies for data acquisition, visualization, decision and warning in hazard and emergency management. For the scope of a campus, we analyzed documents and rules adopted within our institution, and public information provided by other universities worldwide. We selected a set of critical situations, like: fire, earthquake, bomb threat, power outage, campus violence, harassment etc. Generally, these situations are associated with a descriptive procedure to be followed. The contribution presented in this paper is twofold. On the one side, we transformed the text into graph-based, color-coded representations, for visualization support. On the other side, we added functionality to submit event reports from mobile devices and classify them according the predefined set of critical situations, characteristic for the university activities. The Android application communicates with a platform that manages the reports, stores images transmitted by users, and sends notifications. The reports are visible to other users, who can add comments and contribute for a better assessment of the situation. Currently, the reports are integrated and made available to a responsible person, with no recommendation being generated automatically. Future work will be focused on analysis of reports and clustering, to increase situation awareness and campus-specific decision support.