DEVELOPMENT OF A MOBILE APPLICATION FOR EMERGENCY RESPONSE SYSTEM

Abstract

Author(s): Alo, O. O., Adewusi O. O., Owolabi, A. A., Badmus, T. A

Emergency has in time past led to loss of lives and property. Hence, there is need to prepare for likely emergency cases in advance. The level of preparation will determine how well incurred loss will be minimized. Emergency response involves a set of highly coordinated activities from teams of experts. Today in Nigeria, response to emergency cases is very poor due to lack of proper communication between the emergency response team and the victim or rescuer. Thus, the objective of this paper is to develop a mobile application that could be used to coordinate activities between the Emergency responders and the victim or rescuer at the point of incidence. The developed mobile app was implemented in JAVA environment. The app consists of Home Page, Registration, Emergency selection, notification and location page. The user of the app can perform tasks such as reporting an emergency case. The Emergency selection page handles selection of the type of emergency case to be reported by the user of the app. The Emergency notification page reveals the detailed information of the emergency notification alert received which include the GPS location and the kind of emergency assistance the victim needs. The location of the victim in need of an emergency support and the basic information of the victim are handled by the Emergency location page. The developed app was tested when a fire outbreak occurred at a named location in Ogbomoso, Oyo State, Nigeria. The response obtained shows that the developed app accurately works well for the intended purpose. Thus, the developed mobile app could be used to coordinate victim/eye witness to emergency response team activities when there is emergency incidence.