Development of Smartphone Application for Off-Line Use in Case of Disaster

When large earthquakes occur, affected inhabitants lose access to phones and the Internet. To provide immediate assistance to disaster victims, we developed a disaster prevention application that is available off-line, and that has the following characteristics. 1) When communication infrastructures are damaged, the functions of the developed application work off-line. 2) During large-scale disasters, such as the Tokai earthquake and the resulting tsunami, users can examine the inundation range prediction of tsunamis and can read a suitable disaster prevention manual. 3) The developed application is compatible with common, portable devices. We developed an iPhone application and then conducted experiments to evaluate its usefulness. Next, based on the user feedback, we made improvements and then developed an Android application and subsequently evaluated it.