Group Members:
Emily Chen, Senem Cinar, Jessy Ji, Ryan Raffa, Jennifer Schubert

Goal:
Create a low-cost disaster preparedness tool to be used by Mercy Corp in rural China.

Design Question:
How can we distribute an emergency signal device that becomes socially pervasive and easily used by a large portion of the global population?

Concept:
Cell Phone Disaster Whistle – bringing analog communication to the digital device.

Precedence:
Emergency whistles

Additional information:
Based on our own personal experiences with natural disasters as well as information provided by Yue Yao (Mercy Corp, Beijing, China), we felt that there was a gap in how search teams can accurately and quickly rescue victims trapped after earthquakes. For example, there was a major earthquake in Turkey (where Senem Cinar grew up), and many hours and much time was wasted searching for survivors in empty buildings. The digital network was jammed with emergency calls so no emergency cell phone calls would go through or could be made. The solution by the Turkish government was to distribute whistles to densely populated areas. These whistles were effective in making an emergency signal, but ineffective because the people who received the whistles stopped carrying them on their person.

Sketches:

Prototypes:

User Scenario (with brief description):

Full Presentation with user scenario:
Click here.

Next Steps:
Further develop both the embedded cell-phone whistle as well as a low-cost cell-phone protective case emergency whistle.