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TopVarious mobile applications and IT solutions dealing with coordination, communication and tracking during emergencies have been developed in the last lustrum. The pervasiveness of mobile devices has obviated the need for using costly equipment and the fast expanding universe of mobile apps has helped ease creation of solutions that address specific issues. However only a few of these solutions have been successful in streamlining communication in times of emergency.
Chang et al. (2012) proposed to store critical information like observations of earthquake, debris flow, abnormal weather, river pan abuse, abnormal weather, etc. in an online web emergency database system, thereby developing an Android-based emergency SMS broadcasting application where people of the region could receive real-time messages in case of any natural disasters. They identified a design, which included requirement specification of three functional subsystems, namely, web application subsystem (WAS), an emergency database subsystem (EDS) and an embedded mobile application subsystem (EMAS).
Hariprasath et al. (2013) proposed an emergency alerts system where they developed certain efficient mathematical techniques to avoid network congestion while broadcasting SMS alerts. They also calculated the minimum time required for the delivery of those bulk messages using GSM network in smartphones.