YouSOS: A victim-centered multimedia SOS emergency framework

Abstract

The current emergency services are mostly using old-fashioned generic voice-based technologies. Hence, proliferating smart and powerful end-user devices, which are quasi-permanently connected to the Internet is still weakly considered. Given that fact, we design and develop YouSOS, a framework extending the usability of conventional SOS services. YouSOS is built in a way that centralizes rescue operations' scheduling and execution on emergency theaters as perceived by affected in-field persons, rather than remote operators. YouSOS provides multimedia communication between different actors in an emergency situation, e.g. affected persons, polices and medical staff. The media type and its format is automatically configured by YouSOS as a function of ambient usage context and available resources. The front-end user interfaces of YouSOS are designed taking into account confused users' mindset and time pressure. A controller deployed at YouSOS back-end analyses received user and terminal in order to filter-out redundant and irrelevant content. This is done using specific perceived quality models and similarity indexes. Next, YouSOS selects and notifies geographically in-vicinity contacts using different technologies, such as SMS or Instantaneous Messages, e.g. WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger. An implemented prototype of YouSOS demonstrates its potential benefices in order to notify in a customized way the emergency situations.