CICIS: Assisting Citizens During Emergency Situations

Citizen involvement and city integration are the main components of the CICIS system developed in WP8. In our first article, we provided an overview of the general CICIS system and its components. The second article introduced you to the Citizen App and presented an example of how the app can be used to report issues to first responder organisations. This article will introduce you to the ways in which the Citizen App can help you as users of the app during emergencies.

Emergency services can use TeamAware to broadcast emergency messages to users. The Citizen App will receive these messages and will use information voluntarily provided by the app user to identify whether an emergency is relevant for that user. If so, then the Citizen App will immediately notify the user as shown in the figure below. In order to respect the privacy of users, the Citizen App has been designed so that the information provided by users is stored on the smartphone of the user and not transmitted anywhere else.

When users receive a notification, they can choose to receive guidance on what to do in this emergency. Depending on their location, they may be provided with general information on how to behave e.g. during a forest fire or they may be provided with custom guidance if the app determines or the user reports that they are in a danger area. The Citizen App then uses a custom navigation function to guide the user out of a dangerous area and to a suitable location such as an evacuation zone or a hospital depending on the conditions reported by that user. Users can provide this information to the central CICIS system, which can then generate information on e.g. the number of walking wounded or on how busy a particular escape route is expected to be given the guidance provided to end users. If an evacuation route is expected to become busy, the system will automatically select alternative evacuation routes for further users where possible.

These examples show how the app can be used to inform and guide citizens during emergencies. The CICIS system carries out many additional data gathering tasks, e.g. to include data from social media and Internet of Things devices available in cities. For further information, please refer to the project website and the information available there or contact us via the project team.