Harnessing the power of crowdsourcing and Internet of Things in disaster response

Abstract

Crowdsourcing and Internet of Things (IoT) are gaining more and more attention both in industry and academia in order to explore their effects on disaster relief. The current state of the literature shows a clear focus on the extent to which crowdsourcing on one hand, or IoT on the other hand, can individually make a difference regarding disaster response, but very few studies have considered the integration of both crowdsourcing and internet of things in order to link them with disaster response. Accordingly, in this paper, the authors have attempted to develop a crowdsourcing and IoT integration model which could help improving disaster response by using important value derived from using both social media and RFID technology. Furthermore, despite the fact that disaster relief offers similarities with epidemic transmission, (especially the SIR model), the application of SIR model in disaster relief still remains unexplored, which has led the authors to conduct a series of SIR model-based simulations to investigate the extent to which such integration model helps improving disaster response.