A video demonstrating a mobile prototype will be uploaded to the website on Wed 20th May.
In disaster situations it always takes some time before authorities are able to react and send workers to the area. In the meantime, people affected can start to help themselves and people around them. The helptohelp.me service will enable communication, coordination and distribution of the skills and knowledge of the local people willing and capable of helping to the place or assignment where it is most beneficial.
The service consists of a toolkit of communication templates tailored for the needs of different catastrophes. These templates can be easily adapted and implemented to local situations and requirements. In a disaster situation this toolkit can be initiated for communication and information sharing by the authorities.
The service is low tech and operates on any mobile device using text messages (SMS). When a disaster hits and is acknowledged by an authority the system is initiated by an SMS being pushed to all cellphones in the area. The service then functions automatically and interactively - if you send a message, you will get a message back. All information is registered to a database that enables governments, international organizations, the general public and relatives to follow the development of the crisis.
ToGo Manuals is an online tool for WHO’s Health Action in Crisis department (HAC) staff involved in field work, whether leaving for, being in or returning from field. It provides instructional manuals of equipment, procedures and supplies. The manuals consist of step-by-step photo essays or how to videos complemented with text.
The ToGo manuals can be viewed online or downloaded as portable PDF files, as well as saved into a personal manual collection. The manuals can also be enriched by users who can comment on the manuals, update them and create new manuals based on their experiences.
In order to give a concrete picture of the ToGo Manuals concept, we created static user interface (UI) screens and a video. The UI screens demonstrate one way to implement the concept (see below), while the video shows a hypothetical use scenario of how the HAC staff could use the ToGo Manuals.
For further information about the concept, please see the following documentation:
Final report (describes the concept design process and the final concept) Presentation (summarizes the report, mostly pictures) Poster (one page summary of the concept) Video (shows how the ToGo Manuals could be used)
As several people contributed to the concept design process along the way, we want to thank the HAC staff as well as our fellow course mates, teachers and visiting lecturers for their valuable input.
All the best in the future,
Kati Hyyppä, Virva Auvinen, Juulia Juutilainen and Yen Teng Choo
(Group 2)
Our concept is a small Flash application that any web user (WHO’s partners and the media/bloggers in particular) can embed to their site. The tool can show either a selected piece of WHO information - the most typical pieces being graphs and maps - or it can update automatically to show the latest information from a selected WHO source, for example latest news from a certain health crisis.
The tool clearly indicates that the data is from WHO as a trusted source and encourages further sharing. Links leading back to the WHO crisis website help to promote the work of WHO further.
In our project, we aimed at making up-to-date crisis information easier to access by giving visualized data a central role. Evaluating possibilities for the use of social web practices for WHO’s advocacy efforts in close cooperation with WHO-HAC, we found what we call “a soft approach”: a concept that allows WHO to profit from some of the current trends online, while taking into account that publishing data under the organization’s brand is a very sensitive process (that for example eliminated all our ideas on utilization of user generated content at an early stage).
Below, you can try out our prototype of the embeddable widget. For detailed information about our project and its outcome, you may download these final documents:
Concept documentation (describes our research process, the final concept proposal and its reasoning)
Concept poster (one page summary of the concept and how it is anchored into WHO’s advocacy work on the web)
Video (still in post-production, will be added soon)
(This prototype is not an official WHO-product. All the information contained within is from WHO publications. Also, this prototype won’t scale its size to fit the blog width, the real application would scale.)
In an early stage of our study project we met with Nokia-Simens Networks people with a group of engineering students of the Helsinki University of Technology TKK. They were having a study project were students assignment was to create rescue communication solutions. The students were looking really the basic technology solutions, but also the “service” side - how to set-up emergency networks?
Our design work has been more in the “front-end”, close to the final beneficiaries: people, citizens and aid workers.
The TKK study project’s report is interesting reading. Their and our work nicely complement each other.
The report from the TKK project is now online in here:
The final session of the project took place 8 May, 13 - 15 pm (12:00-14:00 GVA), at third floor lecture room here in Media Lab Helsinki. During the session MA students presented the results of their design research efforts during the past spring. 3 concepts where introduced to a local audience of students, staff of the faculty and guests. We where joined by WHO experts in Geneva, connected to Helsinki via video conference.
The session went remarkably well with only few technical problems (Thanks to all for help in setting it up). All groups did a great job in introducing their concepts, background research and ideas. Here some (crappy) images of the session:
Starting the session
Group 1 has designed a sms-based communication tool for people affected by emergencies.
Group 2 has developed an audiovisual collaborative platform to facilitate use of internal manuals and training material.
Group 3 has developed a data presentation widget that can be embeded further
We are confident that both WHO and the study project members learned a lot from this experience. Now all materials are being wrapped up, a last presentation of the concepts will take place in Media Lab’s spring demo day.
Teemu asked me to do a short reminder about packaging the information and presentations of the whole project that we discussed.
A summary of what we agree:
1) Every group will write one blog post with the concept name as title. The post will contain a short description of the final concept, one image and links to the materials to share: slides, report, video or posters, any other relevant links to websites or prototypes. This post will also include the names of the participants.
2) All materials (posters, reports, videos, etc) for dissemination will be marked properly so that credit is given and work is contextualized. Please make sure to add following information:
- University of Art and Design - Media Lab Helsinki (include a logo of TAIK) In mlab internal wiki there is instructions about names, logos, etc https://mlintra.uiah.fi/info/manual/project_guide
- Date when project was made (May 2009)
- Names of all participants
- URL of this blog (course website). And this will also be nice:
- Each concept could provide 1, better 2 good quality images (print quality) that relate to the project that can be used for dissemination (Article in Arttu, TAIK main website, Aalto University News, etc). This will be highly appreciated!!!
- Reports and stuff to be uploaded also to this website to make sure that few years from now when you do not have your own sites up the documentation is available)
Please also remember the presentations for the Media Lab Demo Day! Invitation reads: The staff and students of the Media Lab request your presence at our Spring Demo Day taking place in Media Centre Lume TV-studio at the University of Art and Design Helsinki, on the afternoon of Wednesday 20th May 2009, between 13.00 and 17.00. RSVP by Friday 15.5., 15.00 to Anna Arsniva
Amazing the way swine flu/H1N1 was picked up by social media, when WHO raised the pandemic level to an alarming 5 (out of 6), panicked people across the globe turned to the Internet for information.
Throughout this feverish online activity, WHO was fairly absent in my view (though being quoted in all media). CDC ,on the other hand, has been using social media tools in textbook manner, establishing themselves as the trusted expert and online voice of reason. Through two Twitter accounts: @CDCEmergency and @CDC_eHealth they provide information updates, and follower nrs have risen to more than 65,000 (from 600 prior to the outbreak). Through Twitter, CDC has also directed people to their YouTube channel where videos related to swine flu have so far clocked up more than 800,000 views (growing at amazing pace everday). They’ve also set up a page on their own website, with RSS feeds, podcasts, subscription to email updates etc.. The approach is paying off, with total website visits having grown by 123% this week alone. Hopefully this can serve as a good example for other health agencies and help them revise their outreach approach..
When following the media circus around the swine flu I have been thinking what would be a good source of information to follow the development. Naturally the WHO website is the best place to check the latest news, but if you want to study the topic more where to go?
Flu Wiki is a web site “documenting the current Flu outbreak with a wiki that anyone can edit“. A large part of the content is feeds with links to such a sources as the WHO and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) of US. Even so, it’s nice to find all the content from a single site and follow how people are editing it every hour.
The most interesting piece of information in the flu wiki is related to flues in general:
“… over 36,000 people in the US die annually due to the Flu. That’s around 100 per day or 700 per week, and since the deaths are not distributed evenly throughout the year, it is not unusual to have over 1,000 deaths from flu in a week.”
Participants of the course and followers of this blog might be interested in a conference that the Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley is organizing. The conference is called The Soul of the New Machine, and explores the link between human rights, technology and new media. It takes place between May 4 and 5, 2009, on the Berkeley campus.
The conference invites thinkers and practitioners to share best practices and develop new strategies for incorporating technology to address human rights abuses. There is also a “Mobile Challenge,” a competition for using mobile technology in human rights investigations and advocacy, which will be interesting for us to follow and get familiar with what they did.
These are the topics of the conference
“Eye in the Sky”: Geographic Information Systems, Satellite Imagery, Data Collection and Security
In the Field: Mobile Technologies and Forensic Investigations
Human Rights in the Spotlight: Digital Photography, Multimedia, Animation
