Mobile Application Development for Crisis Data

Abstract

With the reactive nature of disaster relief efforts, the response time of NGO's and humanitarian organizations is critical. Organizations cannot predict the next crisis, nor can they build a catch all solution for any future problem. Consequently, the quicker a system is in place following a crisis, the more data can be collected to improve the relief efforts. Data is vital in assessing the severity of a crisis, informing organizations on how to prepare or give aid, and informing the community about an event. Mobile phones in general, and smartphones in particular, are an ideal tool for the collectionof this valuable data.

Full text

Procedia Engineering 107 ( 2015 ) 255 – 262
Available online at www.sciencedirect.com
1877-7058 © 2015 Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
Peer-review under responsibility of the Organizing Committee of HumTech2015
doi: 10.1016/j.proeng.2015.06.080
ScienceDirect
Humanitarian Technology: Science, Systems and Global Impact 2015, HumTech2015
Mobile Application Development for Crisis Data
Anubhav Jaina, Julius Adebayoa, Eduardo de Leona, Weihua Lia, Lalana Kagala, Patrick
Meierb, Carlos Castillob
aMassachusetts Institute of Technology, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA
bQatar Computing Research Institute, Tornado Tower, 18th Floor, Doha, Qatar
Abstract
With the reactive nature of disaster relief efforts, the response time of NGO’s and humanitarian organizations is critical.
Organizations cannot predict the next crisis, nor can they build a catch all solution for any future problem. Consequently, the
quicker a system is in place following a crisis, the more data can be collected to improve the relief efforts. Data is vital in
assessing the severity of a crisis, informing organizations on how to prepare or give aid, and informing the community about an
event. Mobile phones in general, and smartphones in particular, are an ideal tool for the collection of this valuable data.
The development effort required to create smartphone applications is usually substantial. There are technical barriers to entry,
and usually lengthy development times. Because of this, traditional mobile application development has been limited in its ability
to help disaster relief. The Punya framework, presented in this paper, drastically shortens the development time required for
Android applications, while supporting the communication and sensor features needed to acquire data during a crisis scenario.
Punya’s advanced sensor functionality, as well as its data capture and reporting components, allow organizations to build mobile
applications quickly that can gather both user and context data as well as visualize results.
© 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.
Peer-review under responsibility of the Organizing Committee of HumTech2015.
Keywords: mobile apps; crisis data; punya; smartphones
© 2015 Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
Peer-review under responsibility of the Organizing Committee of HumTech2015

256 Anubhav Jain et al. / Procedia Engineering 107 ( 2015 ) 255 – 262
1. Introduction
Despite modern technological advances, humanitarian response and relief efforts suffer from a
lack of co-ordination and data access. NGOs and humanitarian organizations face problems
related to data collection and data management that can lead to a waste of resources. Several
times relief workers end up resorting to slow manual work, because a potentially more efficient
automatic system is difficult to use or simply does not work. The ubiquity of handheld
computing technology has become invaluable in disaster management and relief operations. Data
collection and management through handheld devices accelerates the aggregation and usability
of the data, with the ability to connect to many other data sources as well.
In a world where key decisions are driven by data, human resources and information are some
of the most important pieces in having a successful response during a crisis and post crisis for
analysis. Crisis information is slowly becoming available through various APIs, like ReliefWeb
[6] and CrisisNET [7], and through projects such as GDELT [8] that are not necessarily crisis-
specific. Disaster information is not just important for relief organizations, but also for
individuals who want to get an understanding of what happened and which organizations were
involved. Individuals can use crisis information to get an understanding of a new environment
they might be entering or of the history of their environment. The new publicly available datasets
have created a need for a new way to enter, browse, understand, and consume crisis data.
2. Motivation
The volume, and variety of data being generated about the world is increasing at a rapid pace.
Recently, it has been estimated that nearly all firms with more than 1000 employees across all
sectors will generate at least 200 terabytes of data. For comparison, 200 terabytes was two times
the size of Wal Mart's entire data warehouse in 1999 [1]. Going forward, even more industries
ranging from healthcare to energy will be driven by data. Such tremendous increase in data
generation has the potential to create value in different ways. Through analysis of such vast
amount of data, key insights can be learned leading to potentially better decision-making.
Increased data generation has not only been limited to companies or large organizations.
Individuals are also generating more personal data, known as digital traces, than ever before [2].
Often, individuals can post and access historical and real time information about their
environment, interests, and other variety of topics through social media and micro-blogging
platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. During cases of emergency and disaster, individuals
often turn to social media platforms to disseminate relevant information on issues regarding their
safety, status, and the overall condition of their immediate environment [4]. Going forward,
several critical decisions are being driven by access to and analysis of data, hence it is crucial to
provide platforms that enable easy access to and integration of various sources of data. In
disaster management, data generated can often be used to drive key decision making capabilities;
before, during, and after a crisis. In such applications, access to data is of critical importance in
ensuring that key actionable insights are learned.
The types of data generated range from sensor readings from physical devices to status
information from social media channels. Often, such data is unstructured consisting of
combinations of images, text, and numeric data. A pressing and distinct challenge involves
combining, querying, and analyzing data from such disparate sources. Given the need to infer
future actionable insights from data, it is critical to develop platforms that can ensure that data
from disparate sources, in various, often unstructured formats, can be combined, queried, and
analyzed. In addition, such data would need to be combined across multiple time spans in order

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to learn historical patterns from curated data, but also to learn emerging trends from real time
data.
As noted earlier, smartphones have come to be used for a wide range of activities. High
penetration of mobile phones across various regions of the world also make them uniquely suited
as platforms through which data analysis can be entered and insights can be presented. In
addition, mobile phones are typically integrated with various kinds of sophisticated sensors that
make them integral to the data collection process. Mobile applications can also be tailored
towards particular tasks depending on the goal of the mobile developer. In a data driven world,
more developers are seeking to integrate several useful data sets into their mobile applications.
Data integration and analysis capability in mobile applications necessitates the need for a
platform that provides seamless data integration in the mobile application creation process.
3. Challenges
The capabilities to quickly create a mobile app and modify them rapidly are critical to make
crisis data available at people’s fingertips. From our collaborations with various NGOs, we
identified three challenges for developing mobile apps for humanitarian projects. The challenges
are (1) lengthy development cycle, (2) costly budget, and (3) lack of agile development. In many
cases, an NGO’s project is a direct response to an ongoing crisis, and given the short time frame,
these challenges are insurmountable.
From our investigation, we have learned that it usually takes around a year to fully develop
and deploy one mobile app and the cost can often be measured in the scale of hundreds of
thousands of dollars. There are many factors for the lengthy development cycle and costly
budget. First of all, NGOs often lack in-house mobile app developers and the mobile app
development and deployment tasks are often outsourced. With that, it is understandable that the
processes of gathering requirements and validating critical features take longer than having in-
house developers. While the needs for crisis relief often involve rescuing human lives, restoring
damages, and coordinating of crisis resources, getting the right requirements for an app would
require in depth discussions with multiple stakeholders. Furthermore, requirement changes often
occur halfway through or near the end of the project cycle and they often require additional
resources. The necessity for an app-building platform that enables fast-prototyping and rapid
testing of an app has become ever more apparent. It helps to refine the requirements that might
not be obvious at the beginning when designing the app.
From our experience working with the NGOs, the ability to reuse and modify an existing app
is greatly favored. Given NGOs current practice for the mobile solution, it is hard for them to
quickly change an existing app on the fly. It would be ideal to have an app-building framework
that allows agile development. The framework should allow its users to upload an existing app,
modify it, and create new apps. The use-modify-create mechanism allows people to customize
the app according to their own needs.
4. How does PUNYA help
Punya is a mobile application development platform that builds on the App Inventor
framework. App Inventor, which is an open source, graphical development platform [3],
provides a block-based interface through which individuals can easily create Android
applications. The App Inventor framework has been successful in introducing millions of
individuals across the world to mobile application development. To date, over 5 million mobile

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applications addressing a variety of domains and tasks have been built through App Inventor. As
an extension to App Inventor, Punya contains a number of additional capabilities for data
collection, querying, and integration in addition to the ability to easily use sensor information
from smartphones. Along with this, crowdsourcing functionality and the ability to obtain
streaming data from platforms such as Twitter are also integrated into Punya.
Punya’s data integration capabilities are uniquely suited to a setting in which key decisions
and actions are driven by data. Through Punya’s data integration extensions, mobile developers
can easily query, analyze, and present actionable insights from both historical and real time data.
Further, mobile developers can also easily integrate crowdsourced data and information from
microblogging platforms into their applications. As another channel for data integration, Punya
allows individuals to easily collect information from various smartphone sensors, such as
accelerometers or wireless connection antennas. Generally, the Punya platform enables mobile
application developers to more easily integrate data into their applications from a variety of
sources in a seamless manner. Finally, the platform is regularly being developed and supports
Android version 2.3 and up, allowing users to use old apps on newer operating systems and
removing the need to worry about upgrades.
Figure 1: Diagram of the Punya use-modify-create Ecosystem
Figure 2: Punya supports streaming data APIs enabling mobile Apps to easily consume this data.

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To date, several applications that leverage the Punya platform have been developed. An
example proof-of-concept application developed using the Punya platform is WeReport [3].
WeReport is an Android based incident reporting application. WeReport allows individuals to
easily report disaster incidents through pictures and videos using their Android devices. Incident
reports are also automatically updated and posted on Twitter. In addition, individuals can also
easily follow various kinds of incidents that occur in their vicinity. The WeReport application
demonstrates how information from smartphone sensors, Twitter, and other sources can be easily
integrated for use in an application. The ease of the use-modify-create mechanism that Punya
allows for enables other individuals to develop additional capabilities on top of the WeReport
application. The WeReport application can be extended to report power outages, or even in
hackathons, to report locations where individuals are seeking help. As various kinds of data are
being analyzed and integrated into mobile applications, mobile developers can look to the Punya
platform to quickly develop Android applications that can integrate different kinds of data
seamlessly.
5. Use case
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN OCHA)
provides ReliefWeb, a public API that provides access to current and historical data on global
crises and disasters. ReliefWeb has been in existence since October 1996, however,
Humanitarian Kiosk, a mobile application to consume the data was not released until 2013 and it
limits the data that is accessible to the public through the application. The reports available
through the application are custom developed and don’t allow the full functionality to browse
through the API.
(a)
(b)
(c)

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(d)
(e)
(f)
Figure 3: Screenshots of Humanitarian Kiosk application built using the Punya framework. Starting at the top left image, users select a country
either (a) by scrolling through the list or (b) by entering a search term, (c) followed by an organization and then can (d) select a report, which
will either (e) open a PDF or a (f) browser to show them the web report.
Using Punya, we built a proof of concept application within a day that not only serves the core
purpose of the Humanitarian Kiosk application but also provides additional functionality. Please
refer to Figure 3 for screenshots of the completed app and Figures 4 and 5 for screenshots of how
the app was developed within the Punya framework. The published Humanitarian Kiosk
application only supports twenty-one countries currently and has a limited set of pre-created
reports. On the other hand, the Punya application supports the dynamic loading of sources with
each time the application is opened and the ability to read reports that are only available as web
based content along with PDF reports. The simplicity of the Punya framework’s drag and drop
interface allowed multiple individuals to edit the application as it was in development and allows
us to easily alter the application as requirements and data sources change. Our application
provides the ability to filter reports by country and then organizations within the country while
this list of both countries and organizations is continually changing with updates to ReliefWeb.
Upon launching the Punya-based Humanitarian Kiosk application, a call to the ReliefWeb
API is made to fetch the complete list of countries for which reports are available. In the original
application, this list is preset and needs to be refreshed whenever a new country is added to the
data set. With our data driven application, the Punya based app will continually update with new
countries as the data becomes available, without needs for further development. After selecting a
country, the user is brought to a page containing the list of organizations that have created
reports for the selected country. Upon selection of an organization a list of documents

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that are either PDFs or Web reports are shown to the user. These documents are opened using the
phone’s Web browser or a built-in PDF viewing application. With little extra effort, we could
change the user flow to support filtering the returned results or even remove the country
organization flow in support of just a list of all possible organizations due to the use-modify-
create functionality of the Punya framework.
6. Summary
The explosion of data and proliferation of smartphones in our world today have driven the
need for new tools that are able to parse, understand, and make information available at our
fingertips. This is even more important with respect to crisis data. The Punya framework is one
such tool that enables data to be quickly gathered and made available via mobile apps. A project
that is closely related to Punya is the Kobotoolbox [5], which is a platform developed by
Figure 4: View of the Humanitarian Kiosk app in Punya's Designer
Figure 5: View of Punya's Block Editor showing a call to the ReliefWeb API

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researchers at Harvard Humanitarian Initiative. However, its focus is to mainly enable quick and
seamless data collection. Unlike Punya, it has no support for the consumption or manipulation of
existing crisis data or crowdsourcing capabilities. The Punya framework provides a simple
interface to design mobile applications for users to not only generate and share data but also
consume crisis data while supporting an agile workflow that allows for fast modification and
iteration. It’s drag and drop design allows users, regardless of experience, to develop mobile
applications that can consume and interact with a variety of data sources. The Punya framework
is constantly growing with additional support for different kinds of visualizations and the ability
to work offline.
Acknowledgements
This material is based on work supported by the Qatar Computing Research Institute and the
National Science Foundation under Grant Number 1228687.
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