Mini Challenge 4: Story boarding
Concept
Our solution is a system that hopes to effectively coordinate smart city technologies before, during and after a flood to lead people to safer places and bring the community together to collaborate as a unit. Emergency communication systems are a necessary part of emergency relief systems[5], and hence the system targets a smart city with emergency communication systems already in place. These emergency communication systems could be based on a completely new infrastructure introduced in the affected areas[6], keeping the entire network up or having the network downgrade to a basic level which supports only relief measures. The system involves two tasks — navigation and distribution of responsibilities, and proposes interventions during the two tasks.
Navigation
Our system would send out early warnings to the citizens of the city through early flood prediction models. This would be communicated to the citizens through a companion app on the citizen’s phone in a phased manner, with the citizens in low lying areas receiving the notification first to evacuate to a safe shelter first. The smart city would have appropriately placed shelters, based on a variety of factors like occupancy of the shelter, number of people to be evacuated and so on. The building that would serve as a shelter could have modular spaces that can be reconfigured to increase occupancy. After the initial notification, the citizens are helped to navigate to their designated shelter on their companion smartphone and/or Augmented Reality (AR) glasses. These would be designed in an offline-ready approach, using data beacons with pre-programmed data related to escape/relief mechanisms and maps, to sync with the apps/glasses. The bars of the street lights would be able to indicate which routes to take, which areas are safe and which are not through colour coded lighting of the stands (for example, the street leading to a shelter could be lighted in green). People using vehicles would be updated with the latest updates and the path to their designated shelter through VANET nodes placed at intervals along the roads.
Distribution of responsibilities
Along the way, the citizen would be able to choose to volunteer to support the relief measures at the relief centre and be able to meet such other volunteers. These interactions would inspire enlistment of more volunteers and help in maintaining social capital through bridging. The volunteer could serve in various capacities like rescuer, medic, cook and leader, fostering new ties and trust building. The roles to be extended to a specific person would depend on his previous training and knowledge for a particular skill. Moreover, these volunteers’ work can be felicitated by the community after successful relief measures to uplift the spirits and maintain the social capital of the affected group.
