A Mobile and Web Application for Mapping Disaster Volunteers’ Position in Indonesia

Abstract

Indonesia is a country located on top of some tectonic plates that bring potential natural disasters. Disaster management system is considered essential in controlling the situation in the site both before and after the disaster takes place. In disaster situation, the government and society are involved in a volunteer team in order to help minimize victims and support survivors. However, the volunteering activities are often hindered since there are problems in the disaster site. One of the problems is late responses due to poor coordination among volunteers that drives the delay in disaster relief. Therefore, it is necessary to have an application that maps the positions of volunteers in a disaster site, so that the disaster management coordinator can disseminate volunteers to disaster areas based on needs. The purpose of the study is to propose an application called ‘MyMapVolunteers’ that effectively and efficiently detects the position of the volunteers in order to improve disaster management service. In this case, real time and location based service technology will able to detect the position of each volunteer. ‘MyMapVolunteers’ is composed of two platforms, which are mobile and web applications. Mobile platform is an application that uses GPS function provided by the smartphone to find the volunteers’ location coordinates and then send the data of the location automatically and manually. The web platform is used to receive volunteers’ location data and to present them in google map, therefore disaster management coordinator can monitor the positions of and search for volunteers faster.