Abstract
Disaster management requires accurate information and must link data collection and analysis to an immediate decision-making process. Existing approaches to assessing population movements in the immediate aftermath of disasters, such as transport surveys and manual registration of individuals at emergency-relief hubs, are often inadequate: while important for record-keeping purposes, both are slow and may exclude those groups who are unreachable and most vulnerable. Proxy analysis via aerial or even satellite reconnaissance has a potentially useful role, but can provide only a coarse geographical picture of moving populations. In practice, the most readily available sources of information are from eye-witness or media reports. Although timely, such reports are not accumulated systematically and can constitute a biased representation of events. Peter Gething and Andrew Tatem discuss the potential impact of mobile phone positioning data on disaster response and highlight challenges that must be addressed if use of this technology is to develop.
Highlights
In recent years, awareness has grown of a potentially revolutionary way of tracking movement and mobility of human populations by exploiting data from mobile phone networks
Population movement can be detected by identifying records for which calls from the same phone are routed via different masts over a period of time
This Perspective discusses the following new study published in PLoS Medicine: Bengtsson L, Lu X, Thorson A, Garfield R, von Schreeb J (2011) Improved Response to Disasters and Outbreaks by Tracking Population Movements with Mobile Phone Network Data: A Post-Earthquake Geospatial Study in Haiti
Summary
Disaster management requires accurate information and must link data collection and analysis to an immediate decisionmaking process. Existing approaches to assessing population movements in the immediate aftermath of disasters, such as transport surveys and manual registration of individuals at emergency-relief hubs, are often inadequate: while important for record-keeping purposes, both are slow and may exclude those groups who are unreachable and most vulnerable. Proxy analysis via aerial or even satellite reconnaissance has a potentially useful role, but can provide only a coarse geographical picture of moving populations. The most readily available sources of information are from eye-witness or media reports. Timely, such reports are not accumulated systematically and can constitute a biased representation of events
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