At the heart of every natural disaster there are people trying to locate loved ones. When communication networks are down though and there’s panic in the streets it can be incredibly difficult to gain any useful information. A team from the Copenhagen institute of Interaction Design has come up with a fantastic idea. Refugee Finder is a mobile app that can operate without needing a mobile network and works by collecting information taken by aid workers and then sharing it across a central network.
During a disaster aid workers would use the app to take pictures of people they find and to input information including location. If the mobile networks were down then aid workers would return to base and synchronise that data with a centralised system that then pumps out information to everyone, including radio and TV stations. People would also be able to upload information themselves. This would hopefully help people find friends and family a lot easier. It’s a simple but brilliant idea and we hope it gets used.
The project was developed as part of a graphical user interface class at the Copenhagen institute of Interaction Design. The team consists of Elena Gianni, Pedro Nakazato Andrade, Jesper Svenning.
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