A study on deaf people supporting systems using cellular phone with Bluetooth in disasters

Telecommunications are powerful tools to reduce loss of life and property damage during disasters. Especially, for the people with disabilities, information provided through their own telecommunication devices is indispensable to move to a place of refuge safely and rapidly. In this paper, we propose the wireless system to send information on disasters to people with disabilities (especially deaf people) and to identify their location at the refuge when they are evacuated. The system consists of cellular phone, web server and electronic display, which are concatenated by Short Message Service (SMS) and Bluetooth. By using these devices and public network services, the system provides a function to send appropriate information to people with disabilities rapidly. The system provides the network platform to share information about their whereabouts with related persons. Finally, we summarize results from demonstration of our system to the deaf people experienced large earthquake.