Emergency Citizen Responder

To make emergency operations more efficient and effective, this real-time crowdsourced information platform improves cooperation and data exchange between multiple organizations, the affected individuals, and potential volunteers in the area. Using instantaneous mobile communications, reaction times can be reduced, diminishing the occurrence risk of fatalities and empowering citizens through improved access to information while also providing and updating the emergency status.

Machine learning could process and accelerate calls to dispatchers while filtering out redundant or less urgent requests. It could naturally interact with callers, instantly transcribe and translate languages, and analyze the tone of voice for urgency. Furthermore, by examining user sentiment changes on social channels, first responders could be given a head start, and computer vision could analyze unstructured data in photos and videos posted online to help find missing people.

As current emergency response systems still rely on telephone hotlines— which can easily become overburdened in an acute event— emergency response units could help improve and solve current infrastructure's technical problems. The combination of the growth of the Internet-of-Things and the near-ubiquity of smartphones offers the opportunity to integrate these new data sources into an emergency response system based on crowdsensing; real-time data extracted from sensors and devices to inform strategic courses of action.

Gender Equality

Challenges

• Certain communities are historically stigmatized, and emergency responders going to these places may be less inclined to act, or completely overlooked by the authorities.

Opportunities

• This type of technology, if connected to different groups, will facilitate cooperation between individuals, governments, and organizations when responding to emergencies from vulnerable groups.

• Any biases within the system would be open to public audit as the system provides a permanent record, accessible by anyone, to illustrate who designated which resources, which emergency actions were taken, and in which areas.

• This would also increase the possibility of women being able to voice their concerns and respond to mitigation approaches by taking into account gender-specific needs, such as enhancing awareness regarding hotspots of violence, such as sexual harassment. The goal would be to entirely avoid these situations or swiftly respond to them in time.