Design and Trial of a Cell-phone-based Hazard Information Sharing System for Residents Living Close to an Incident

This paper presents a hazard/crime incident information sharing system using cell phones. Cell phone penetration is nearly 100% among adults in Japan and cell phones have functions which are sufficient as a telecommunication tool besides GPS positioning and camera functions. The open source software, Apache, Postfix and MySQL is installed on a system server, and, together with the information service provided by Google Maps, are used to satisfy system requirements that are determined for the local community. Conventional systems deliver information to all people registered in the same block, even if an incident occurred at a spot far from their house. The key feature of the proposed system is that the distribution range of e-mail messages which give hazard and location information etc. is determined by the geometrical distance from the incident spot to the residence of each registered member. The functions and operations have been confirmed by a trial conducted in cooperation with the members of the neighborhood community.