SHIELD: Social sensing and help in emergency using mobile devices

Gautam S. Thakur, Mukul Sharma, Ahmed Helmy

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

13 Scopus citations

Abstract

School and College campuses face a perceived threat of violent crimes and require a realistic plan against unpredictable emergencies and disasters. Existing emergency systems (e.g., 911, campus-wide alerts) are quite useful, but provide delayed response (often tens of minutes) and do not utilize proximity or locality. There is a need to exploit proximity-based help for immediate response and to deter any crime. In this paper, we propose SHIELD, an on-campus emergency rescue and alert management service. It is a fully distributed infrastructure-less platform based on proximity-enabled trust and cooperation. It relies on nearby localized responses sent using Bluetooth and/or WiFi to achieve minimal response time and maximal availability thereby augmenting the traditional notion of centralized emergency services. Analysis of campus crime statistics and WLAN traces surprisingly show a strong positive correlation (over 55%) between on-campus crime statistics and spatiotemporal density distribution of on-campus mobile users. This result is promising to develop a platform based on mutual trust and cooperation. Finally, we also show a prototype application to be used in such scenarios.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication2010 IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference, GLOBECOM 2010
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
ISBN (Print)9781424456383
DOIs
StatePublished - 2010
Externally publishedYes
Event53rd IEEE Global Communications Conference, GLOBECOM 2010 - Miami, United States
Duration: Dec 6 2010Dec 10 2010

Publication series

NameGLOBECOM - IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference

Conference

Conference53rd IEEE Global Communications Conference, GLOBECOM 2010
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityMiami
Period12/6/1012/10/10

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