Using Social Media and the Mobile Cloud to Enhance Emergency and Risk Management

All emergency events require fast response and decisions based on first-hand information. This paper presents a mobile cloud service that makes the best use of social media applications, such as Twitter, in emergency and risk management. Risk and emergency teams can receive in matter of seconds data that can inform their decisions when an emergency has affected areas under their management. The proposed system allows users to provide on-the-ground information regarding such an event, as well as early notification to people who are in the vicinity of the location of an emergency situation. The system matches users' requests to a set of pre-defined labels that will help rescuers to understand the situation more clearly. The service is implemented and tested with Android devices and a cloud-computing instance hosted on an Amazon platform. A cloud-based tool is also provided for risk and emergency management teams to interact with users' requests. The experimental results show that the system enhances the early detection of emergencies.

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