CrowdMonitor

Abstract

Emergencies such as the 2013 Central European flood or the 2013 typhoon Haiyan in Philippines have shown how citizens can organize themselves and coordinate private relief activities. These activities can be found in (physical) groups of affected people, but also within (digital) social media communities. There is an evident need, however, for a clearer picture of what exactly is going on to be available for use by the official emergency services: to enlist them, to keep them safe, to support their efforts and to avoid needless duplications or conflicts. Aligning emergency services and volunteer activities is, then, crucial. In this paper we present a mobile crowd sensing based concept, which was designed as well as implemented as the application CrowdMonitor and facilitates the detection of physical and digital activities and the assignment of specific tasks to citizens. Finally we outline the findings of its evaluation.