Communications - February 2010

lightweight, and cheap. Reflecting Rao’s promotion of dual-use technologies that require minimal training, UNICEF is pioneering RapidSMS and a field-based communications system called Bee.

RapidSMS provides real-time transmission of data in a breaking emergency or in a long-standing disaster, allowing aid workers to monitor supplies and report on situations that require immediate response. At the moment, it is being used in a number of African countries to monitor nutrition, water, sanitation, and supply chains.

UNICEF’s Bee is an open source
emergency telecommunications sys-
tem that provides Internet access in ar-
eas where infrastructure is nonexistent
or unusable. It provides a telephony
service and Wi-Fi access to applica-
tions such as ones that monitor health
and track supplies. The Bee system re-
quires no tools, and can be installed by
a field worker and be operational within
30 minutes. Working with RapidSMS,
it helps UNICEF provision supplies
appropriately and gives workers im-
mediate warnings of potential health
risks and disease outbreaks. When an
area stabilizes, the Bee system is left in
place, acting as a base for a new com-
munications infrastructure.

in malawi, unicef’s Rapidsms system enables the registration of children and the monitoring of their nutritional status in an effort to stem the nation’s high infant mortality rate.

Further Reading

Dilmaghani, B. and Rao, R.

A systematic approach to improve communication for emergency response. Proceedings of the 42nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Waikoloa, hI, January 2009.

Lien, Y.N., Tsai, T.C., and Jang, H.C. A MAnET-based emergency communication and information system for catastrophic natural disasters. 2009 29th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, Montreal, Canada, June 2009.

Palen, L. and Liu, S.

Citizen communications in crisis: anticipating a future of ICT-supported public participation. Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, San Jose, CA, April 2007.

Shklovski, I., Palen, L., and Sutton, J. Finding community through information and communication technology in disaster response. Proceedings of the ACM 2008 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, San Diego, CA, november 2008.

Showalter, P. and Lu, Y. (eds.) Geospatial Techniques in Urban Hazard and Disaster Analysis. Springer, new York, 2009. Tierney, K. From the margins to the mainstream? disaster research at the crossroads. Annual Review of Sociology, Palo Alto, CA, August 2007.