A personal emergency communication service for smartphones using FM transmitters

Communication networks such as cellular phone networks are quite likely to be severely damaged during a large-scale of disaster, making SOS message dissemination to rescue authorities extremely difficult. In this paper, we first propose a FM radio-based emergency communication service through the integration of FM transmitters into smartphones. FM radio provides a number of advantages such as longer propagation length and less susceptible to obstacles, making it suitable for broadcasting SOS messages. Besides, we design Morse code-based SOS message dissemination using FM transmitters (MCSOS-FM) and its corresponding communication procedure for the emergency communication service in order to improve communication range, victim localization and evacuation route planning. The combination of FM radio and Morse code is completely compatible with the current radio system equipped by rescue workers, and thus increases the possibilities of successful receiving and recognizing SOS messages. Our experiment result based on smartphone implementation shows that the proposed emergency communication service is cost effective and energy efficient with relatively large communication range.