A Review on Mobile Applications for Citizen Emergency Management

Mobile devices may be a powerful tool to help in case of emergency, not only for the person or people in danger but also for those ones giving assistance to them, professionally or not. In order to determine how mobile applications are currently being used in this area and the possibilities for innovation, this paper gathers the result of a review of about more than 250 applications commercially available. These applications have been featured to analyze their value proposition (e.g. main service goal, target user or pricing approach) and their operational features, with respect to their level of context-awareness and the discovery and notification of emergencies. Additionally, the paper proposes the functional design of a mobile application for Citizen Emergency Management, which takes advantage of the gap of the available offer.

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