|
The tasks achievable by mobile handsets continuously exceed our imagination. Statistics show that the mobile phone
sales are soaring, rising exponentially year after year with predictions being that they will rise to a billion units in 2009,
with a large section of these being smartphones. Mobile service providers, mobile application developers and researchers
have been working closely over the past decade to bring about revolutionary and hardware and software advancements
in hand-sets such as embedded digital camera, large memory capacity, accelerometer, touch sensitive screens, GPS, Wi-
Fi capabilities etc. as well as in the network infrastructure to support these features.
Recently we presented a multi-platform, massive data collection system from distributive sources such as cell phone
users1 called PreNotiS. This technology was intended to significantly simplify the response to the events and help e.g.
special agencies to gather crucial information in time and respond as quickly as possible to prevent or contain potential
emergency situations and act as a massive, centralized evidence collection mechanism that effectively exploits the
advancements in mobile application development platforms and the existing network infrastructure to present an easy-touse,
fast and effective tool to mobile phone users. We successfully demonstrated the functionality of the client-server
application suite to post user information onto the server.
This paper presents a new version of the system PreNotiS, with a revised client application and with all new server
capabilities. PreNotiS still puts forth the idea of having a fast, efficient client-server based application suite for mobile
phones which through a highly simplified user interface will collect security/calamity based information in a structured
format from first responders and relay that structured information to a central server where this data is sorted into a
database in a predefined manner. This information which includes selections, images and text will be instantly available
to authorities and action forces through a secure web portal thus helping them to make decisions in a timely and prompt
manner. All the cell phones have self-localizing capability according to FCC E9112 mandate, thus the communicated
information can be further tagged automatically by location and time information at the server making all this
information available through the secure web-portal.
|
