Help Me: Opportunistic smart rescue application and system

Communicating during disaster times is crucial for both survivors and rescue forces. While fast reaction is critical communication infrastructures, wired and cellular, are often lost, and cannot be restored in a timely fashion. In this paper we present HelpMe, a self learning opportunistic ad-hoc system, which enables smartphone-based ad-hoc communications at disaster times over Wi-Fi. HelpMe smartphone peers communicate using a sophisticated mechanism that performs a transparent on-the-fly classification and matching of requests to peers in the formed opportunistic ad-hoc network. Matching is further leveraged for a smart forwarding, enabling the request to reach the best matching user in the vicinity. Our system enables best peers matching across an opportunistic ad-hoc network on a hop-by-hop basis, in a timely and power conservative manner. Location coordinates are sent with each request. The client is built on top of the Haggle middleware, leveraging its neighbor discovery and interest-based forwarding. The HelpMe client is fully implemented as an iPhone application on top of the Haggle middleware. The HelpMe system consists also of a HelpMe cloud-based server, used only when communication is available before and after the crisis. The server is used for profiling users and creating personalized apps for the users. When communication is restored, it can be leveraged for collecting information for missing persons services. The server is implemented as a web service. We tested the system using several iPhone / iPad clients communicating over Wi-Fi and showed that our settings not only enable a best match, but also enable willing users to become hub nodes in the formed opportunistic network. The system is self-adjusting and supports on the fly settings modifications.