Mobile phones Extremely Useful during and after Natural Disasters

Mobile phones Extremely Useful during and after Natural Disasters

A study has been conducted to see the potential of mobile phone to improve the emergency responsiveness in situations like natural disasters and calamities. The researchers have analyzed and concluded the importance of mobile phone in major disasters such as the Haiti Earthquake in January 12, 2010.

In our day and age, mobile phones has become extremely useful and has revolutionized the spread of information via call and text messaging.  For many disasters and natural calamities, accurate information and immediate data collection and analysis is needed in order to provide an efficient decision-making for the emergency response team. Currently, there are many challenges during and after natural disasters including the slow data record-keeping and manual registrations and surveys. In practice, media reports and eye witness accounts are the most readily available information source. But most of the time, the reports accumulated are often bias and does not represent the whole picture.

In a span of 6 weeks before the earthquake and 5 months later, the group was able to study the movement of people. The figures gathered during the study was found out be almost the same from figures gathered in a different survey, a more detailed and costly study, as compared to the figures used in the actual disaster response during the crisis. The researchers suggest that mobile phone data can be used to provide a robust and detailed picture of the population movement than any other data readily available for the disaster response team.

Long before, Mobile phone has been thought to be used to study population movement. Currently, the potential use of mobile phone to track population movement in a disaster aftermath has not yet been explored.

Posted by George Daniels on Wednesday November 02 2011, 4:51 AM EST. Ref: Bengtsson et al. Link. All trademarks acknowledged. Filed under Featured News, World. Comments and Trackbacks closed. Follow responses: RSS 2.0