Phone's Wi-Fi hotspot acts as SOS beacon in disasters

An app that turns a smartphone into a wireless SOS beacon could one day help rescuers track down people who have been trapped in collapsed buildings after natural disasters or bombings.
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The team consulted emergency workers from the Haiti and Fukushima disasters and developed a "victim app" and a "seeker app". "They wanted it simple, unencrypted and smart," says Al-Akkad.That meant avoiding known problems like low-power, low-range Bluetooth radio links, which often fail to connect – or "pair" – with each other amid the clutter of metallic debris in broken buildings. So they stuck to the much more robust and receivable Wi-Fi radio.

Victim app

With the victim app a trapped person can write a 27-character message such as "broken leg stuck in bank" or "need help fire on 4th floor" and a seeker app up to 100 metres away can pick it up. The app found two "trapped" people in a large-scale, simulated terrorist attack at a seaside chemical plant in Stavanger, Norway – an exercise organised by the Norway-based research organisation Sintef.

The team will present the apps at a computer interaction conference in Toronto, Canada, in April – and they also hope to demonstrate them to rescue professionals at a crisis response conference in Pennsylvania in May.