Using general public connected devices for disasters victims location

Information Technologies (IT) have largely contributed to improve disaster management by providing new means to acquire, process and broadcast information to the various actors. However, most of the work was targeted toward the risk experts: decision makers, rescue teams, firemen, etc. Nowadays, a new parallel trend seems to emerge: it consists in taking into account signal from consumer devices like cell phones (basic ones to smartphones), tablets, computers or other devices but light networks equipment (routers, WiFi access points) too. More particularly, our goal is to rely on the wave activity generated by those equipments, which are generally personal, to detect where victims are more likely to be located after a disaster, typically a seism. To reach this aim, we present the feasibility of mixing two approaches to acquire data by measuring their radio activity.