Applications of Social Networks and Crowdsourcing for Disaster Management Improvement

Emergency resources are often insufficient to satisfy fully the demands for professional help and supplies after a public disaster. Furthermore, in a mass casualty situation, the emphasis shifts from ensuring the best possible outcome for each individual patient to ensuring the best possible outcome for the greatest number of patients. Historically, various manual and electronic medical triage systems have been used both under civil and military conditions to determine the order and priority of emergency treatment, transport, and best possible destination for the patients [12][13][15][16][17][18]. Unfortunately, none of those solutions has proven flexible, accurate, scalable or unobtrusive enough to meet the public´s expectations [7]. In this paper, we provide insights into the trends, innovations, and challenges of contemporary crowdsourced e-Health and medical informatics applications in the context of emergency preparedness and response. Additionally, we demonstrate a system, called CrowdHelp, for real-time patient assessment which uses mobile electronic triaging accomplished via crowdsourced information. With the use of our system, emergency management professionals receive most of the information they need for preparing themselves to provide timely and accurate treatments of their patients even before dispatching a response team to the event.