User Participatory Sensing for Disaster Detection and Mitigation

Abstract

Rapid growth in communication bandwidth has enabled novel uses of mobile wireless technologies in areas such as smartphone-based user participatory sensing for disaster detection and mitigation. In this manuscript, we discuss novel approaches to resolve fundamental problems that currently hamper the effective utilization of user participatory sensing in this critical application domain. Our approaches to address major challenges related to energy efficiency, collaboration, privacy, ease of deployment, and robustness of communication can be integrated with external systems in a complementary manner to overcome the limitations of current disaster detection and mitigation systems that rely on expensive stationary devices.