Information Sharing for Emergency Response

Abstract

TwiddleNet uses smartphones as personal servers to enable instant content capture and dissemination for first- responders. It supports the information sharing needs of first responders in the early stages of an emergency response operation. In TwiddleNet, content, once captured, is automatically tagged and disseminated using one of the several networking channels available in smartphones. TwiddleNet pays special attention to minimizing the equipment, network set-up time, and content capture and dissemination effort. It can support small teams of emergency responders in the first 48-72 hours of an emergency response by using smartphone-based infrastructure and scale up to handle a much larger number of users with a more robust backend.